Escape from the Flames

In the court of Hastinapura, Duryodhana could not sleep for the heat of his envy. The people had begun to speak openly of Yudhishthira's virtue, of how the eldest Pandava would one day make a just and gentle king. Every word of praise for his cousins fell upon the prince like a coal upon dry grass. He went to his uncle Shakuni, and to the suta's son Karna, and to his brother Dushasana, and together in the dark they hatched a plan that wore the smiling face of kindness.

"There is a festival at Varanavata," Duryodhana told the blind king Dhritarashtra, his voice all honey. "A great gathering in honour of Lord Shiva. The town is famous for its beauty. Let our cousins go and enjoy it, father. Let them rest awhile away from the noise of the city." He spoke of brotherly love, of giving the Pandavas pleasure and ease, and the old king, who loved his own sons too much to see through them, let himself be persuaded.

Dhritarashtra was not wholly a fool. Somewhere beneath his blindness he sensed the shape of the thing his son wanted. But he had long ago surrendered his will to his children's desires, and so he said the words that doomed the house of Pandu to a journey from which Duryodhana never meant them to return. "Yes," the king sighed. "Let them go to Varanavata. Let them be happy there."

What the king did not say, and what Duryodhana did not speak aloud, was the true purpose of the gift. For Duryodhana had already chosen the man who would build the Pandavas a palace at Varanavata, and the materials that palace would be made of, and the manner in which all five brothers and their mother would die in it.

Duryodhana summoned a trusted servant named Purochana, a man skilled in building and untroubled by conscience. "Go ahead of the Pandavas to Varanavata," the prince commanded. "Build them a mansion finer than any they have seen. But build its walls of lac and resin, its beams of dry hemp and bamboo, and soak every floor and pillar in oil and clarified butter. Make it so that it looks like the work of love and burns like the breath of death. When the brothers have grown comfortable and their guard has dropped, set it alight in the dead of night, and let no one suspect that it was anything but an accident."

Purochana bowed and went to Varanavata with carts of lac and hemp and oil, and there he raised a palace that took the breath away. Its towers were white as bone. Its gardens were green and cool. Inside, the rooms were spacious and fragrant, hung with soft cloth and furnished like the dwelling of a god. To any eye it was a treasure. Yet anyone who knew the secret of its making understood that it was a single enormous lamp, waiting only for a flame.

Purochana called the mansion Shivam, the Auspicious, and that name was the first of its many lies. He moved into a chamber near the entrance so that he might watch the brothers come and go, and he settled in to wait for the months it would take to lull them. Patience, Duryodhana had told him. Let them trust the place. Let them love it. Then burn it down around their sleeping bodies.

Far away in Hastinapura, the Pandavas prepared to leave. They had no idea that the home being readied for them was a grave dressed in flowers.

Among all the men of Hastinapura, only one saw clearly and loved justly, and that was Vidura, the wise minister born of a serving-woman, brother to Dhritarashtra and Pandu, the steadiest mind in that house of intrigue. By the patient gathering of small signs Vidura had learned the whole shape of Duryodhana's plot, and his heart ached, for he could not openly accuse the prince without proof, and the blind king would never believe ill of his son.

So Vidura did the only thing he could. As the Pandavas made ready to depart, he drew Yudhishthira aside on the road, away from listening ears, and spoke to him in the language of the Mlechchhas, a tongue of forest tribes that the two of them had learned together long ago and that no one else nearby could understand. In riddles he gave his warning.

"He who knows the plans of his enemy," Vidura said softly, "and shapes himself accordingly, escapes the danger. The weapon that is not made of steel can still cut a man's life away. Know that there is fire that does not consume the porcupine, who burrows beneath the earth. The one who reads the stars and the winds, who keeps his five senses awake, who does not trust the smiling stranger, that one is never destroyed. Remember the jackal who digs many holes and so survives the hunter."

Yudhishthira listened, and his calm face did not change, though understanding turned cold inside him. When Vidura had finished, the eldest Pandava replied in the same secret tongue. "I have understood you, uncle. I will remember the porcupine and the jackal and the unseen fire." Then he rejoined his mother and brothers, and not even Kunti, walking beside him, knew what dreadful knowledge he now carried.

The Pandavas came to Varanavata with their mother Kunti in a procession that the whole town turned out to greet. The citizens lined the road with garlands and bright cloth and cried out blessings, for they loved the sons of Pandu and rejoiced to have such noble guests among them. Yudhishthira walked at their head with a face of perfect serenity, returning every greeting, betraying nothing of the warning he carried in his heart.

Purochana received them with great show of devotion and led them to the palace he called Auspicious. The brothers looked upon its white towers and cool gardens and fragrant halls, and even Bhima, who suspected everything, had to admit it was beautiful. Kunti was delighted. But Yudhishthira, the moment he stepped inside, lifted his hand to the wall as if in admiration and let his fingers brush the surface, and he caught the faint oily smell of lac beneath the perfume and the sweet odour of resin in the beams. He bent as if to praise the floor and smelled ghee and dry hemp where there should have been honest stone and clay.

When they were alone, Yudhishthira spoke quietly to Bhima. "Brother, smell the walls. Touch the pillars. This whole house is built of fire waiting to be lit. Every wall is lac. Every beam is hemp soaked in oil. One spark, and we burn." Bhima's hand tightened until his knuckles whitened, and his first instinct was to seize Purochana and break him. "Then let me kill the dog who built it," he growled.

"No," said Yudhishthira. "If we strike now, Duryodhana will only try again by some other means, and next time we may not be warned. We are watched. We must seem to suspect nothing. We will live here, smiling, until we have found a way to escape this trap and to make our enemies believe that the fire took us after all."

Vidura had not sent only words. Knowing that warning alone would not save the brothers, he had dispatched after them a trusted man skilled in digging, a miner who knew how to cut secret passages through the earth. One night this man came quietly to the palace and presented himself to Yudhishthira, and to prove that he was no spy of Duryodhana's he repeated to him the exact words of Vidura's riddle about the unseen fire and the burrowing porcupine. Then Yudhishthira knew that heaven had not abandoned them, and he welcomed the miner as a friend.

"Purochana means to burn this house in the fourteenth night of the dark fortnight," the miner told them, "or whenever he judges your guard has fallen. He will block the doors and set the fire near the entrance so that you cannot escape the way you came. We must dig a tunnel beneath the floor, hidden, leading away from the palace and toward the forest and the river Ganga."

So the work began, in secret and in silence. By day the Pandavas wandered the gardens and the streets of Varanavata, hunting, feasting, and making themselves seem carefree and content, so that Purochana watching from his chamber near the gate would believe them lulled and unsuspecting. By night the miner and the brothers dug, lifting the floor at the centre of a large hall, hollowing a passage through the dark earth, and carefully covering the opening each dawn so that nothing showed.

The tunnel grew slowly, foot by foot, week by week. The Pandavas slept always with their weapons near, and they took turns to keep watch, and they never spoke a careless word, for the walls themselves were their enemy. A whole year passed in this fashion, the brothers living between two faces, the calm one they wore for the world and the watchful one they wore in the dark.

It is a hard thing to live for a year inside the house that is meant to kill you, smiling at the man who means to light the match. Yet this was the discipline the Pandavas held to. Yudhishthira reasoned that they must not flee too soon, for if they simply vanished, Duryodhana would hunt them across the land and contrive some fresh death. Far better, he said, to let the enemy carry out his plan in part, so that the kingdom would believe the brothers had truly perished, and then they could slip away into the wide world unpursued, free to wait for the day their strength was ready.

So the brothers played their parts. They praised the palace to Purochana's face and thanked Duryodhana in their letters home. They went about the festival of Varanavata, they hunted in the surrounding woods, they were generous to the townsfolk, and to every watching eye they were happy guests with no thought of danger. Bhima found the pretence the hardest, for his great heart longed to crush the schemers, but he held his peace at his brother's command.

Beneath this calm surface, every night, the tunnel crept onward toward the river. The miner shored its roof and hid its mouth, and the Pandavas hauled out the loosened earth and scattered it where it would not be seen. They studied Purochana's habits, learned when he slept and when he watched, and counted the days, waiting for the tunnel to reach far enough into the forest that they could escape unseen.

Kunti, meanwhile, prepared for the day of fire in her own way. Knowing what was coming, she resolved upon a plan that would give the searchers bodies to find, so that the deception would be complete. She watched and waited like her sons, a mother holding a terrible secret behind her gentle eyes, until at last the moment arrived to spring their trap before Purochana could spring his.

When the tunnel at last ran far enough beneath the earth to bring them clear of the palace and into the cover of the forest, the Pandavas knew the time had come. Yudhishthira judged that they must act before Purochana, and turn the agent's own fire against him. That night Kunti held a great feast and gave alms, inviting many of the townsfolk and the poor to eat and drink in the palace, as was her generous custom.

Among the guests that night came a wandering tribal woman, a nishada of the forest people, and with her came her five grown sons. They were poor and weary, and Kunti welcomed them and gave them food and wine in plenty. The five sons and their mother ate and drank until they were heavy and content, and overcome by the wine they fell into a deep sleep in one of the great halls, unable to rise. It was a grievous thing, six guiltless lives, and Kunti's heart was not untouched by it, yet she could not warn them without betraying everything, and she let them sleep.

The whole purpose of the feast had been to give the morning's searchers bodies to find. Six who slept in the palace, a woman and five who would be taken for Kunti and her five sons, so that when the ash was raked through and the burned remains were counted, the world would believe that the Pandavas and their mother had all perished in the blaze. It was a dark mercy and a darker necessity, and the brothers would carry the memory of those innocents for the rest of their lives.

When the feast had ended and the rest of the guests had gone home and the town had fallen quiet, the Pandavas and Kunti made their final preparations. They gathered what little they would carry. They readied the mouth of the tunnel. And Bhima, the strongest of them, took a torch in his hand and waited for his brother's word.

In the dead silence of the deep night, Bhima went first to the chamber near the entrance where Purochana slept. The man who had built this trap, who had waited a whole year for the chance to burn five princes and their mother in their beds, now lay dreaming in his own creation. Bhima set the fire there, at the doorway of Purochana's own quarters, so that the architect of the plot would be the first the flames embraced. The schemer woke too late, and the death he had prepared for others closed over him.

Then Bhima carried the torch through the palace, touching it to the oil-soaked pillars, the resin walls, the dry hemp beams. The lac caught with a roar. What had been built to burn now burned as it was built to. Flame ran up the pillars and across the ceilings faster than a man could run. The white towers turned to towers of fire. The whole great mansion of Varanavata became a single roaring pillar of flame that lit the night sky for miles, so bright that the townsfolk far off woke and cried out, thinking the very heavens had come down.

While the fire spread above, the Pandavas and their mother fled below. Bhima, strongest of men, took Kunti upon his shoulders, gathered the twins Nakula and Sahadeva upon his hips, and bore Yudhishthira and Arjuna along beside him as they plunged into the dark mouth of the tunnel. Behind and above them the palace thundered and collapsed in cascades of burning ruin, the sound of its falling chasing them through the earth.

They came out at last far away among the trees, on the bank of the river, with the orange glow of the burning palace flickering through the forest behind them. Six guiltless guests and one guilty agent lay dead in the ash. The sons of Pandu and their mother stood living and free in the night, breathing the cool air of escape, their enemies' triumph turned in a single hour to their enemies' mistake.

At the river's edge, where the tunnel had brought them, a boatman was waiting in the darkness. Vidura, foreseeing every step of their escape, had sent a swift and trusted boat to carry them across the Ganga before the dawn could betray them. The boatman greeted Yudhishthira with words that only Vidura could have taught him, proving himself a friend, and the weary family climbed aboard.

The boat slid out across the broad black water. Behind them the glow of the burning palace still stained the sky, and the cries of the awakening town drifted faint across the river. Kunti wept quietly, partly for the relief of being alive, partly for the six who had died in their place, and partly for the long uncertain road she knew now lay before her sons. They had escaped death, but they had not escaped exile, for they could not return to Hastinapura while their enemies believed them dead and their own claim to the kingdom could not yet be pressed.

The boatman carried them swiftly to the far shore and then turned back, his task done, vanishing into the night as quietly as he had come. The Pandavas stood on the eastern bank as the first grey of morning touched the world, six travellers with nothing but the clothes they wore and the weapons they carried, and a long stretch of forest before them.

"We must go on," said Yudhishthira, "deep into the wilderness, away from any road where we might be known. Let Duryodhana believe us ash. Let him grow careless in his victory. Our hour will come, but it is not yet. Until then we walk unknown." And so, turning their backs upon the river and the smoke, the sons of Pandu and their mother went into the deep forest as the sun rose.

When morning broke over Varanavata, the townsfolk gathered weeping around the smoking ruin of the palace they had so admired. They raked through the ash and found the charred bodies of a woman and five men, and beside them the burned remains of Purochana. Knowing nothing of the tunnel or the feast or the nishada guests, they concluded what they were meant to conclude. "Alas," they cried, "the noble Pandavas and their mother Kunti have perished in the fire, and the wicked Purochana with them." Some among them suspected that the fire had not been an accident, and they cursed the cruelty of Duryodhana, but they had no proof, and grief swallowed their anger.

The terrible news travelled swiftly to Hastinapura. The whole court put on the garments of mourning. Bhishma the grandsire wept, Drona grieved, and the citizens cried aloud in the streets for the sons of Pandu they had loved. Only one man among them did not despair, and that was Vidura, who alone knew the truth and kept it locked behind a face of sorrow, comforting the others with gentle words while his heart was secretly glad.

Duryodhana and his counsellors heard the news with savage, hidden joy. The rivals who had haunted the prince's sleep were gone, he believed, swept from his path in a single night, and he could already taste the kingdom that would now be his alone. He performed the rites of mourning with the rest, but behind his grieving mask he and Shakuni and Karna exchanged the looks of men who have won. They did not know that the ash they wept over held the bodies of strangers, nor that the cousins they thought destroyed were even then walking living and free into the forest, biding their time.

So ended the plot of the house of lac. Duryodhana had built a palace to be a grave, and a grave it had become, but not for those he intended. The Pandavas had passed through fire and come out alive, hardened and hidden, and the wheel that would one day carry them back to claim their birthright had begun, silently, to turn. Their enemies mourned them. Their one true friend smiled in secret. And out in the wide green wilderness, the five brothers and their mother walked on toward the adventures that lay waiting, no longer princes of a city, but free.