The Forest Retreat

For fifteen years after the great war, the blind old king Dhritarashtra lived in Hastinapura as an honoured elder in the very house his sons had lost. Yudhishthira had given strict orders the moment the kingdom passed into his hands. The old king was to be served in all things as though Duryodhana and his hundred brothers were still alive and still ruled - the same soft beds, the same fragrant food, the same musicians at evening, the same hush of deference at every doorway. Whatever pleased Dhritarashtra was to be brought before any Pandava took his own share.

Yudhishthira would not sit until the old man was seated. Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva attended him like sons. Draupadi and Subhadra waited on Gandhari as daughters wait on a mother. Kunti, the Pandavas' own mother, served the queen who had once been her rival in the women's quarters, and there was no rivalry left between them now, only two aging women bound by the same losses. Dhritarashtra was, in the words of the chroniclers, like a teacher dwelling among devoted disciples, wanting for nothing that a king could want.

Gandhari sat beside him as she always had, the blindfold still bound across her eyes - the cloth she had wound there on her wedding day, vowing never to see more of the world than her blind husband could see. She had kept that vow through a hundred sons and through their deaths, and she kept it still. Vidura, wisest of all the Kuru elders, read the scriptures aloud to the old couple at dawn and spoke to them of dharma and of the soul's long journey. Sanjaya, the charioteer to whom the sage Vyasa had once given divine sight so that he might narrate the whole war to his blind master, never left the king's side, anticipating his every need.

To any visitor the household seemed a model of peace. The man who had coveted the throne was cared for by the men who had won it, and not one of them let him feel the bitterness of his defeat. Yudhishthira meant it wholly. He had not the smallest wish to wound the old king; he carried his own guilt over the slaughter and longed only to atone by service. But under the calm surface of that house, one grief had never been laid to rest.