The Blindfold of Gandhari

Gandhara lay at the far northwestern edge of the known map, beyond the five rivers, where the road climbed into stone and the horses were the finest in the world. Subala was its king. His daughter was famous twice over: once for her beauty, and once, more usefully, for a boon of Shiva's that promised her a hundred sons.

Word of that boon traveled, as such words do, the whole length of the road down to the Ganga and into Hastinapur, where Bhishma was assembling a future for a house that had very nearly died out.

The embassy that came up through the passes was magnificent and unarguable. Bhishma did not arrive as a suitor's friend. He arrived as the Kuru state.

The proposal was for Dhritarashtra, eldest of the Kuru princes.

Subala's court knew what the messengers had not troubled to say aloud, because everyone from the mountains to the sea knew it: that the eldest of the Kuru princes had been born blind, and had for that reason been passed over for the throne in favor of his younger brother.

Shakuni, the king's son, was against it from the first hour and said so.

'They are offering my sister to a man who cannot look at her,' he said. 'And they do not ask. They announce. This is not a marriage, it is a levy.'

'It is Bhishma,' said Subala, 'and behind Bhishma is an army, and behind the army is the greatest house in Bharata. Refuse, and they take what they want and we have insulted them into the bargain.'

So the answer went back down the passes, and the answer was yes. Gandhari was not consulted, which was ordinary. What was not ordinary was Shakuni, who from that day carried the arrangement about inside him like a stone in a shoe, and who would still be carrying it forty years later when he sat down to a game of dice.

They told her on a morning in her father's house, and they told her gently, which she did not need.

Gandhari heard it out to the end. Then she asked a single question, whether the marriage was already agreed, and was told that it was.

She went into her chamber alone. When she came out she was wearing a folded cloth bound many times across her eyes and knotted behind her head, and she did not take it off again for the rest of her life.

Her women cried out. Her mother reached to untie it. Gandhari held it with both hands and said the sentence that has never stopped being argued over.

'My husband cannot see the world. I will not enjoy what has been denied to him.'

Read one way, it is the purest wifely devotion in the whole poem: a bride who refuses to hold an advantage over the man she has been given to, who makes herself his equal at the cost of everything she will now never see, the faces of her own children, the color of the country she is going to, the road beneath her feet.

Read another way, it is the only protest available to a woman who was never asked. She could not refuse the marriage. She could refuse the world that had made it. Every day of her life afterward, in a court that had traded her, she would sit at the center of the hall as a standing accusation, and no one would ever be able to say that she had complained.

The epic does not choose between these readings. Gandhari carried both of them down the passes, across the rivers, and into the palace at Hastinapur, where they led her to a husband she would never see and set her hand into his.

Vyasa came to Hastinapur out of the forest as he always did, without warning, and stayed as long as he chose.

Gandhari served him. Blindfolded, she saw to the water and the fire and the food, learned the geography of a great house by counting her steps, and let no fumbling of hers cost the guest a single moment's waiting. Wet from the rain, hungry, tired off the road, he was received and settled and fed by a queen who did all of it with her own hands.

When he rose to leave he said, 'Ask.'

She asked for a hundred sons, equal to her husband in strength.

'You have it,' said Vyasa, and walked back into the forest, and thought no further about the matter, because that is what such men are like.

Dhritarashtra, when he was told, was as glad as he had ever been in his life. A hundred sons. The blind prince who had been set aside for a younger brother, and who had been handed a kingdom only when that brother went off to the mountains and died there, would have a hundred sons. Nobody in the palace said aloud what all of them were counting: how many sons Pandu had, and how few.

Gandhari conceived. And then nothing happened.

A year went by. The child did not come. A second year began, and the weight in her did not turn or quicken; it lay there like a stone, growing heavier and doing nothing else. The women murmured. The astrologers were summoned and were careful. Dhritarashtra stopped asking. And Gandhari, who could not see a single face around her, heard all of it in the pauses, which was the education the blindfold had given her and which the palace never once remembered she possessed.

In the second year the news came down from the mountains. Kunti, the wife of Pandu, had borne a son. He was called Yudhishthira. He was, by every count that mattered, the eldest of the next generation.

The woman who brought the news into Gandhari's rooms did it kindly. Gandhari sat quite still while it was said. Then she stood up and struck herself in the belly with the whole of her strength.

The blindfold hid her face. It did not hide the sound.

Understand what that one sentence had taken from her. She had endured two years of a pregnancy that would not end. She had been promised a hundred sons. She had been given a husband whose single grievance in life was that he had been passed over for a younger brother. And now the younger brother's wife had produced the firstborn, and the throne would go the same way again in the next generation, exactly as it had gone in this one. Everything Gandhari had bound her eyes in order to accept was going to happen a second time.

What came out of her after the blow was not a child. It was a mass of flesh, hard as an iron ball, and she gave the order that it be thrown away.

Vyasa was there before it could be done. He was not angry. He asked her only whether she had wanted a hundred sons or not, then sprinkled the mass with cool water and divided it into a hundred and one pieces set in jars of ghee - and that is the story of the birth of Duryodhana, and belongs to its own telling.

Gandhari lay in the darkness she had chosen and waited two more years to hear a child of hers cry. When the first of them was born, jackals howled at the gates of the city, and every priest in Hastinapur told Dhritarashtra to give the boy up, and Dhritarashtra could not.

A hundred sons grew up around her, and she raised them without ever seeing one of their faces, and she knew exactly what they were.

She told her eldest so. She told him in the open hall, in front of his brothers and his uncle and his friend, that a kingdom is held by self-command, that greed devours the greedy first, that half of Bharata was more than his father had been born to and he should take it and be at peace. Her husband, who could deny that boy nothing, listened and did nothing. Her brother, who had been carrying a stone in his shoe since the day the embassy came up through the passes, kept his own counsel and smiled.

When the war came, her son knelt at her feet every morning before he went out, for eighteen mornings, and asked for her blessing. He wanted three words. Any mother in Bharata would have given them.

'Where dharma is,' said Gandhari, 'there is victory.'

That was all. He asked the next day and got the same. Eighteen times he knelt, and eighteen times she handed him the only truth she had, which was also the precise shape of his death, and then let him go. She would not lie to him. She would not curse him. She would not send him out unblessed. She had bound her eyes rather than hold one advantage over her husband, and she would not now hold her blessing over her son as a bribe to make him good.

When it was finished she walked the field herself, and what she said there to Krishna is another story, and it cost the world its avatar.

She had given up her sight for a husband and her hundred sons to a war, and she had kept the one faculty her court never valued in her. From the beginning, she had seen exactly how it would end.