The Iron Embrace

The fires on the plain of Kurukshetra burned a long time, and when they had finished there was a season in which that family did nothing at all but perform rites.

They had carried the dead out of eighteen days of war and burned them by the thousand, kings whose names heralds called out over the flame and boys whose names nobody living could supply. Afterward what was left of two armies went down to the river and stood waist deep and offered water to the ash, and it took most of a day, because there was a great deal of ash.

Then the Pandavas came to Dhritarashtra.

He was sitting on a low seat outside the pavilion they had put up for him at the edge of the field, because he would not go back into the city yet. Gandhari sat beside him with the cloth still across her eyes; what she would say to Krishna when she finally went out to look at that field cost the world its avatar and is told in its own place. At the turn of the year the two of them had possessed a hundred sons. They now had none.

Yudhishthira came first, and he came the way a man walks up to be sentenced.

'I am Yudhishthira, sir,' he said, and put his hands on the old man's feet. 'The son of your brother. The killer of your sons.'

The blind hands came down and found his head and stayed there. Dhritarashtra said the correct things, in a voice that had clearly been rehearsed in the dark of the pavilion for some days, and blessed him, and there was nothing wrong with any of it.

Krishna stood a little back from all this and watched the old man's hands.

There is a version of Dhritarashtra in which he is only a grieving father, and it was the version he was performing, and it was not a lie. It had simply never been the whole of him. He had permitted every step of the road to this field rather than say one hard word to his eldest, and his grief was still entirely real, and both had lived in him at once for sixty years.

Then the old king lifted his head.

'Where is Bhima?' he said.

Nobody answered at once.

'Bring him to me,' said Dhritarashtra into the pause. 'Let me embrace the son of my brother. Let me hold the man who killed my hundred children, and then let there be peace between us, and let us go home.'

On the surface it was the most generous sentence anyone had spoken on that plain in eighteen days.

Bhima started forward. Krishna put a hand flat against his chest, and Bhima stopped, because over that year he had learned to.

Krishna was looking at the old man's arms. They were a blind man's arms and they were the arms of that house: in his youth people had said Dhritarashtra had the strength of ten thousand elephants, and even now the hands lying open on his knees were enormous. They were not resting. They were waiting. There is a way a man holds his hands when he is about to receive something, and a different way when he is about to take hold of it, and Krishna could tell the two apart at forty paces.

'Stand where you are,' he said quietly.

'He is old,' said Bhima. 'He is blind, he is old, he has nothing left in the world. Let him have this.'

'He is going to have it,' said Krishna. 'He is not going to have you.'

He sent two men at a run to the baggage lines and told them what to look for, and they found it under an oiled cloth where it had been dumped with the rest of the spoil out of Hastinapur.

For thirteen years, while the sons of Pandu were in the forest, Duryodhana had kept an image of Bhima standing in his practice yard. It was cast in iron and made to the man's own height and breadth, and every morning of those thirteen years the prince had gone out to it with a mace and beaten it, and gone in again to breakfast.

The Pandavas had found it still standing there when they took the city back. Nobody had known what to do with such an object, so it had been dragged out to the camp with everything else and left lying under its cloth, waiting, as it turned out, for exactly one afternoon.

They brought it up on a sledge with ropes, eight men leaning into it, and the iron rang softly each time the runners came off a stone. Everyone on that side of the camp turned to look. Nobody said anything, because Krishna had put one finger against his lips and the whole army had spent eighteen days learning to read him.

They set it upright in front of the old king, close enough that he could have touched it by leaning.

'My lord,' said Krishna, 'here is Bhima.'

Dhritarashtra rose. He came off the low seat without help, which he had not done in a month, and he put out his hands, and they went over the chest and the shoulders and the great cold column of the throat, and whatever he found there satisfied him, because he made a small sound of recognition.

'Child,' he said.

Then his arms closed.

What happened after that was not quick, and the not being quick was the terrible part. The old man's shoulders came up. His back bent. His heels lifted off the ground. Somewhere under the beard his mouth had pulled open, and no sound came out of it at all, and the veins stood out along his forearms in cords. The iron went on being iron for a long moment. Then it began, very slightly, to give.

The chest of the statue folded inward. A seam in the shoulder opened with a noise like a door in winter. And then the whole thing burst apart in his arms and went across the ground in pieces, and one of them skidded to a stop against Yudhishthira's foot, and the sound of it rolled out over a plain where a hundred thousand men were buried, and came back.

Dhritarashtra stood swaying with his arms still closed on nothing.

Blood came out of his mouth.

Then his knees went, and he sat down hard among the iron shards of his son's practice yard, an old blind man with his hands open in front of him, and began to make a noise that nobody there had ever heard a king make.

'Bhima,' he said. 'Bhima. My son.'

He was groping across the ground for the pieces, gathering them against himself, and the edges were opening his palms and he did not appear to notice.

'I have killed him,' he said. 'Do you understand what I have done? I have killed my brother's son. Pandu is dead and this was what was left of him and I have broken it in my arms in front of you all. I did not mean it.'

Then he stopped, because he was many things but he was not, at that particular moment, a liar. He had meant it. He had meant it for eighteen days and thirteen years and a good part of sixty.

'You did not kill Bhima,' said Krishna.

The old head came around.

'Bhima is standing four paces to your right and has not moved. What you crushed was iron. It was your own son's iron, cast to his order and beaten by him every morning for thirteen years, and this afternoon it did the work it was made for.'

For a long moment Dhritarashtra could not get anything out at all.

'Why,' he said at last. 'Why would you do that to me, Krishna?'

'Because you asked for Bhima with your voice,' said Krishna, 'and you asked for something else with your arms, and both were true, and only one of them could be allowed to happen. King, you have been two men your whole life. You loved your brother, and you let his sons be sent to a house built to burn. You loved dharma, and you sat in your hall and listened to a woman dragged in by the hair and said nothing. You loved your eldest son, and you knew from the day he was born exactly what you were keeping. You have never once been only one thing, and I did not expect you to become one thing today. So I let the half of you that wanted a killing have its embrace. Now the other half can have the one that comes after.'

He crouched down in front of the old man among the shards.

'Say it,' he said. 'Out loud, here, where it can end. Say what you wanted.'

'I wanted him dead,' said Dhritarashtra.

'Yes,' said Krishna. 'And now you do not.'

Then Dhritarashtra sat on the ground in the iron and wept in a way that a man of his rank was not supposed to weep in front of anybody, and nobody stopped him, and it went on a long time. Yudhishthira knelt beside him and held his shoulder. Gandhari did not move at all, and behind the cloth across her eyes nobody could tell whether she was weeping too, which was the arrangement she had chosen forty years earlier and had never once regretted.

When it was finished he was empty. That is the only word for what he was. Whatever had been packed into those arms had gone out of them and lay in pieces on the ground where anyone could see it.

'Bhima,' he said.

'Uncle.'

'Come here.'

Bhima came. He walked into the arms of the man whose hundred sons he had killed with his own hands, and there was nothing in the grip at all. The blind hands went over his shoulders and his face and his hair the way a man reads a thing he cannot see, and the old king said that he was strong, and that Pandu had been strong, and that he was glad, and it was the first entirely honest thing that had passed between those two families in forty years.

'You did what you swore you would do,' Dhritarashtra said. 'I heard that oath sworn in my own hall and did not stop it, and that is my portion, not yours.'

Afterward he blessed each of them by name, told Yudhishthira to rule, and went back to the city on an ox cart with his wife beside him, to live out his years in a palace full of nephews he had once tried to burn alive as boys.

But the reconciliation held, which nobody standing on that plain that morning would have wagered a coin on. It held because it had been permitted to be true. Grief that is not allowed to break anything does not become peace; it becomes patience, and patience of that kind waits sixty years and then closes its arms. Krishna gave an old man something to destroy, made him name the thing while the pieces were still on the ground, and only then let a living body into those hands.