The Birth of Duryodhana

Gandhari had bound her eyes with a folded cloth on the day she was given to a blind husband, and that vow is her own story; so are the two years she carried the hundred she had been promised, a weight that lay in her and never once turned.

What belongs to this telling begins on the morning it came out of her.

It was not a child. It lay on the birthing cloth like something dug out of a dry riverbed: a mass of flesh the color of old iron, hard to the knuckle, round as a water jar, entirely still. No cry. No breath. Two years, and this.

'Take it away,' she said. 'Carry it beyond the walls. Bury it where nothing will dig for it, and do not tell me where.'

They had their hands under it when the light in the doorway changed.

Vyasa came in from the forest with dust on his feet, as he had come at every hinge of that house's history, and stood over the cloth and looked down at what was lying on it.

'Set it down,' he said.

'It is nothing,' said Gandhari. 'It is two years of my life and it is nothing at all.'

'Did you ask me for a hundred sons?'

'I asked.'

'Then this is a hundred sons,' said the sage. 'My word has never gone out and come back empty. What is on that cloth is not dead. It is early. Bring me cool water, and send to the dairy for jars. A hundred and one of them, filled to the neck with clarified butter. And have the ground opened under this wing of the palace, a chamber deep enough that the heat of the day never reaches the bottom of it. Go quickly. It is drying while you stand there.'

The house of Kuru had learned long ago not to argue with him. Within the hour there were men below with mattocks and women running the corridors with clay in their arms, and the queen who had asked for a hundred sons sat blindfolded beside a lump of iron-colored flesh, listening to her palace obey a man who had not yet explained himself.

The water came up in a bronze bowl, and Vyasa dipped his hand and sprinkled it.

Under the cold the mass loosened. It did not tear. It came apart the way a thing comes apart that was always many and had only been pressed together in the dark. Piece by piece the sage lifted the parts free, each the size of a thumb joint, each warm.

He counted aloud as he set them into the ghee, and the women counted with him. At a hundred he stopped. One piece was still lying on the cloth.

'A hundred,' said Gandhari. 'You promised me a hundred.'

'And there they are, in a hundred jars.'

'Then what is that?'

'What would you ask for,' said the sage, 'if I let you ask a second time?'

She sat with her bound face turned toward the sound of him. She had a hundred sons cooling in clay beneath her own floor, and a brother in the west corridor already calculating what a hundred of them would be worth.

'A daughter,' she said. 'One child of mine who is not raised to be a soldier.'

'She is here already,' said Vyasa, and set the hundred and first piece into its jar with his own hands. 'Call her Dussala. She will be married a long way west of here, and she will outlive every brother she has.'

He had the jars sealed and sunk in the cool earth, and gave one instruction before he walked back into the forest. Open nothing. When the time in them is full they will come open of their own accord, and the first will be the eldest.

'How long?' asked Dhritarashtra, who had come down the cellar stair on a servant's shoulder and had not stopped smiling since the word hundred reached him.

'Two years,' said Vyasa. 'Perhaps a little more.'

So the palace acquired a nursery made of clay. Lamps burned in the chamber, guards stood at the stair, and the blind king went down among the jars most evenings and walked the rows with his fingertips, counting. Twice in those two years riders came from the mountains with word that Kunti had borne a son to Pandu, which is the birth of the princes and is told in its own place, and both reports reached the cellar before they reached the throne.

The city was hanging garlands when it happened.

Word had come from the mountains that the eldest of Pandu's sons was to have his birth rites performed, and Hastinapur, which had waited a long time for any child at all, was making a festival of a boy it had never seen. The name in the lanes that morning was Yudhishthira.

In the cellar, a lid moved.

The woman keeping the lamp heard the clay grind and called up the stair, and by the time the household came down the first jar had opened along a seam. There was a child in it, finished: hair, nails, weight, everything. They lifted him out slick with ghee, and he took his first breath in the lamplight of an underground room, and opened his mouth.

The sound that came out of him was not a child's cry. It was the bray of an ass.

For a moment nobody in the chamber moved. Then, from the stable yard, an ass answered. Then another from the lanes below the wall, and another beyond that, until the whole city seemed full of the noise, and out on the burning ground the jackals took it up and howled in the middle of the afternoon. Vultures came down and sat along the ridge of the palace roof and would not be driven off. The wind turned and came in from the wrong quarter, dry and carrying grit. In the hall above, the household fires bent to the left and smoked. The sun went the color of beaten copper.

Somebody said the word ass out loud, and after that nobody in the cellar said anything.

Upstairs, Dhritarashtra was already on his feet with his head turned toward the window.

'What is that?' he said. 'What is making that noise?'

'Jackals, my lord.'

'Before the jackals.'

Nobody answered him. He put his hands out, and they brought the child up the stair and laid it in his arms, and the boy was heavy and hot and perfectly quiet now, and the blind king stood holding his firstborn son against his chest in a room where every other person present was looking at the roof.

'Send for Vidura,' he said at last. 'And for the brahmanas. All of them.'

They came into a hall where the lamps would not burn straight.

'Say it plainly,' said Dhritarashtra, before any of them could arrange it into something softer. 'I cannot see your faces. Do not make me guess at what is on them. Tell me what happened outside this house today.'

An old priest told him, in order, the way such things are told: the voice of the child and what it resembled; the answering of the asses; the jackals in daylight; the vultures on the roof; the fires leaning; the wind out of the wrong quarter; the ring of copper around the sun. He offered no interpretation. There is a point at which a list interprets itself.

'And?' said the king.

'And these are the signs that attend the ending of a house, great king.'

Then Vidura spoke, because he was the only man in the room who was going to.

'The signs are not obscure,' he said. 'They are not even subtle. This child has been born to burn the Bharatas out of the world. He will empty this hall. He will put the ash of his own family into the river by the cartload, and it will happen because we all stood here on the one afternoon when it could still have been stopped.'

'Say what you are asking me for.'

'Abandon him.'

The word went around the hall and came back.

'Set him out tonight,' said Vidura. 'Before he is named, before the rites, before he has had an hour of your love in him. You have ninety-nine sons under this floor and a daughter besides, and not one of them carries this. For the sake of a family a man gives up one of its members; for a village, a family; for a country, a village; and for his own soul he would give up the whole earth. One child, and you keep the hundred, and the kingdom, and the house.'

Gandhari was in the hall. She had come down when they sent for her and had said nothing since. She turned her bound face toward the small sound the baby made in his father's arms, and she did not speak, and the epic has never once said what she wanted.

Dhritarashtra had gone on holding the boy through all of it, turning him so that the child's head lay in the crook of his elbow, the way a man holds something he means to keep holding.

'You are asking me,' he said, 'to carry my son out past the wall tonight and put him down for the jackals that are still calling.'

'I am asking you to spend one grief and buy a hundred lives with it.'

'The gods gave him to me.'

'The gods have spent the whole afternoon telling you what he is,' said Vidura. 'That is also a gift, and it is the last one you will get.'

There was a long silence.

'No,' said Dhritarashtra.

That was the whole of his answer. He offered no argument, because he had none. He was a blind man passed over for a throne, who had waited two years beside a cellar for a child, and who was now holding the first thing in his life that had come to him without qualification. He would not put it down. Years later he would hear the same counsel from the same man about a game of dice, and an exile, and a war, and would say no in that same voice.

They named the boy Suyodhana, which means one who fights well. It was a hopeful name chosen on a day that had earned no hope, and the world handed it back altered. Duryodhana, it said. Hard to fight.

Over the following month the jars came open one after another, Dussasana and Vikarna and ninety-six more, and last of all the daughter, Dussala. The omens of that afternoon were never mentioned again in the king's hearing. What those hundred became to the five sons of Pandu belongs to the story of that childhood.

Dhritarashtra loved his son. That is the entire case for him and the entire case against him. He was asked once, clearly, with the evidence in front of him, to give up one thing in order to keep everything else, and he could not subtract. He died blind in a hall with no sons in it, and the hundred jars had all come back to him as ash on the water.