Dussala, the Only Sister

She was the last of the jars to open.

When Vyasa divided the mass of hard flesh that Gandhari had carried for two years, a hundred of the pieces were the sons the queen had asked for, and the last was the one she asked for afterward, when the counting had stopped and one piece was still lying on the cloth. A daughter, she said. One child of hers who would not be raised to be a soldier. They called her Dussala.

She grew up as the only girl in a courtyard containing a hundred boys, which is a particular kind of education. She learned early that a room can be won by being the quietest thing in it. She could tell her brothers apart by their footsteps before she could count to a hundred, which almost nobody else in Hastinapur ever managed.

And she was a sister to the other side as well. The five sons of Pandu came down into that same courtyard as children and grew up in the same dust. To Dussala they were not the enemy of anything; they were the cousins who lifted her onto the wall by the water gate so that she could see the river. She held no faction at all. In the whole of that city she was the only person of whom that was true, and it would cost her more than anyone.

Duryodhana loved her. Whatever else has to be said about him, and there is a great deal, he was a good brother to his sister. It was their father, Dhritarashtra, who gave her in marriage.

The king of Sindhu was called Jayadratha, and Sindhu lay at the far western edge of the map, where the great river runs out into salt and the sea comes up the channels at evening. It was a long way. It was also an alliance worth a fleet of ships and the whole western road, and everybody in the hall understood that part of it.

Dussala went west in a covered cart with a hundred brothers riding escort as far as the edge of the desert. There they turned back, and she went on with strangers, and she did not see Hastinapur again for a very long time.

Sindhu suited her better than anyone at home had expected. It was a country of hot white light and river mouths and boats, and the women there had their own way of doing things, and she learned it. She bore a son and named him Suratha. When the harvest was bad she opened her own stores before the treasury's, which the people remembered afterward, and which is a large part of why this story ends the way it does.

Her husband did not suit her at all. Jayadratha was a proud, sour, unlucky man who believed himself owed a greatness that kept failing to arrive, and who had married into the most powerful house in Bharata only to discover that he was still nobody in it.

During the forest exile of the Pandavas he came on Draupadi alone at the hermitage in Kamyaka and put her in his chariot and drove, and that is its own story. What belongs to this one is the end of it. They ran him down, and Bhima had him face down in the dirt with a fistful of his hair and a hand already lifted, and Yudhishthira said, 'Let him live. Think of Dussala.' They shaved his head in five ridiculous tufts and let him go, and the reason he went on breathing at all was his wife's name in his enemy's mouth.

He never forgave any of them for it, least of all for the mercy. He went up into the hills afterward and did penance until a boon was given him, and came back down certain that he would one day hold the sons of Pandu off a battlefield for a whole day by himself.

Dussala watched all of this from her own hall and said what a queen in her position could say, which was very little.

When the war came, the only daughter of a hundred sons sat in a palace on the far western rim of the world and waited for news that would be bad in whichever direction it arrived. Her brothers were on one side. Her cousins were on the other. Her husband had ridden east to join the brothers, which was the one arrangement that guaranteed she would lose twice.

News from Kurukshetra reached Sindhu late, in the wrong order, and from mouths that had heard it from somebody else.

At last a rider came in who had been weeks on the road, and Dussala went down to hear him herself, standing.

A boy had been killed on the thirteenth day, a boy of sixteen, surrounded and cut down inside a formation he could enter and not leave, and her husband had been the man holding the gate shut behind him. Arjuna had sworn that night to kill Jayadratha before the following sunset or walk into fire himself. How that day ended is told in its own place. It ended with her husband's head.

After that the reports came in as a list, and the list was of her brothers.

Dussasana on the seventeenth day. Vikarna, who had been the only one of the hundred to speak for Draupadi in the hall, somewhere in the middle of it. Names she had learned to tell apart by their footsteps in a courtyard, arriving at the rate of eight and ten a day, until the rider reached the eighteenth morning and the thigh and the mace and the mud of the lake, and Duryodhana, the brother who had carried her on his shoulders, was the last of the hundred to go.

When the man had finished, Dussala stood in her own courtyard as the widow of a king killed by her cousins and the sister of a hundred men killed by the same five hands, and there was no direction in which she could turn her grief that did not run into her own family. She could not hate the Pandavas without hating the cousins who had lifted her onto the wall. She could not defend her brothers without defending the hall where Draupadi had been dragged in by the hair. She was the one person the war left with nowhere to put it.

So she put it nowhere. She mourned her husband and raised her son, and Suratha grew up in a country that had sent an army east and got back a list, in a hall where the older men fell silent when a child came in.

A year or so went by. Yudhishthira ruled at Hastinapur, badly at ease with it, and to purify a throne taken at that price the priests told him to perform the horse sacrifice.

The rite is simple to describe and enormous to carry out. A horse is consecrated and turned loose to wander for a year, and an army walks behind it, and every country it enters must either let it pass, which is submission, or stop it, which is war. Arjuna went as its guardian, under orders to take no life he could avoid taking.

It was a strange, wandering campaign: old enemies came out to fight him, were beaten and forgiven, and were sent back into their halls as kings again. In time the horse turned west, came out of the desert, and walked into Sindhu.

They saw the dust before the banner, and in Sindhu they did not need the banner. Everyone from the sea to the hills knew whose bow that was. A generation had grown up in that country on one sentence: that the sun had seemed to set, and their king had lifted his head to look, and an arrow had taken it off his shoulders.

They brought the word to Suratha in his own hall. He was a young man by then, not a soldier, sitting among the same silent counsellors he had grown up under.

He did not call up an army. He did not send terms. He did not run. He heard the name spoken, and his heart stopped in his chest where he sat, and he was dead before anyone could reach him.

The poem gives it one line. Some deaths in this story take a chapter and some take a line, and it is not always the long ones that say the most about a war. The war reached across the whole width of the land and killed him with a word.

So the horse of the Pandava sacrifice walked into a country whose king had just died of hearing a name, and the warriors of Sindhu, remembering whose arrow had taken their king's head, came out anyway and fought him. Arjuna, bound by his brother's order to spare kings, called on them to yield, and when they would not, he cut them down in numbers and left the rest reeling and heartsick on the plain.

What came next was not another army.

One woman came out toward him, in the white of a widow, with nothing in her hands, and in her arms a small child. She walked the whole distance across open ground toward a line of chariots, and did not hurry.

Men lowered their weapons as she passed, without being ordered to. Arjuna saw her and cast aside his bow.

'You know me,' she said.

'I know you,' said Arjuna.

'This is my grandson, the son of your sister's son. His father is dead. Nobody laid a hand on him. Somebody came into the hall and said your name, and his heart stopped. Do you understand what that means, brother? Your family no longer has to strike mine. We only have to be reminded.'

Arjuna began to say something and she went on over him.

'His grandfather did what he did, to Draupadi in the forest and to your son at the gate, and you killed him for it, and I have never once said you were wrong. My brothers made a war and lost it, and I have never said you were wrong about that either. But there is nothing left in Sindhu to punish. There is a dead boy in the hall behind me and this one in my arms. If your horse is to be fought over here, it will have to be fought over by me.'

She held the child out at arm's length.

Arjuna had killed more men than anyone on that plain could name. He had also, long ago, lifted a small girl onto a wall by the water gate so that she could see the river. His bow already lay in the dust. He thought of Gandhari and of Dhritarashtra, and when he spoke it was not to her but against the whole code of his own caste.

'Shame on Duryodhana, greedy for a kingdom and blind with pride. For his sake I have sent every kinsman I had to Yama.'

Then he comforted her, embraced her, and sent her home, and she called her warriors off the field. The horse went on the next morning. The Mahabharata does not end at Kurukshetra; it ends in places like this, one refusal at a time. She was the only child in that family not raised to fight, and the only one who ever stopped anything.