A Royal Childhood at Hastinapura

In the great city of Hastinapura, on the banks of the Ganga, the royal nursery was the noisiest place in all the kingdom of the Kurus. One hundred and five boys grew up there together, and the marble corridors rang from dawn to dusk with their shouting.

The hundred sons of the blind king Dhritarashtra and his queen Gandhari were called the Kauravas, after the founder of the line. The eldest of them was Duryodhana, born under dark omens - jackals had howled and asses had brayed on the night of his birth, and wise men had urged the king to cast the child away. Dhritarashtra had not been able to do it. So Duryodhana lived, and his ninety-nine brothers after him, with Dushasana close behind him in age and in temper.

Beside them grew the five sons of Pandu, Dhritarashtra's younger brother, who had died in the forest. These were the Pandavas. Yudhishthira was the eldest, grave and honest even as a small boy. Then came Bhima, broad as a young bull. Then Arjuna, quick and bright-eyed. Last came the twins, gentle Nakula and thoughtful Sahadeva, born of Pandu's second queen, Madri. Their mother Kunti had brought them back from the mountain to be raised in the city of their fathers.

The boys were dressed alike and fed alike. They studied their letters together, wrestled together, and slept in the same wide halls. To a visitor it looked like one great family. But underneath the surface, like a current under still water, ran a quiet and growing trouble. For these were two sets of cousins, and only one throne, and the question of who would one day sit upon it had never truly been settled.

Watching over them all stood the grand old man of the house, Bhishma, their great-uncle, who had given up his own claim to the throne long ago. He loved all the boys equally and worked to keep them as one. But not every heart in that palace was so even, and the trouble that Bhishma feared was already taking root.

Of all the boys, none was made like Bhima. He had been strong from the cradle. The old story told that as an infant he had once slipped from his mother's arms and fallen onto a rock, and it was the rock that shattered, not the child. As he grew, his strength grew with him until it was a thing of wonder and, for some, a thing of fear.

Bhima loved his cousins, but he loved rough play even more, and he did not always know his own power. When the boys climbed the tall fruit trees in the palace gardens, Bhima would seize the trunk and shake it until the Kauravas tumbled down like ripe mangoes, laughing and bruised. When they swam in the river, he would catch them by the hair, hold them under until they spluttered, and let them go gasping. When they wrestled, he would pick up eight or ten of them at once and roll them in the dust like a farmer threshing grain.

To Bhima it was all a great game. He bore no malice. He would haul his cousins out of the water by the armful, set them on the bank, and roar with laughter as they coughed and complained. He shared his sweets, carried the smaller boys on his shoulders, and never once used his strength in true anger.

But the hundred Kauravas did not laugh as he did. Day after day they came home with skinned knees, with lumps on their heads, with their fine clothes torn and muddy. They were the sons of the reigning king, and here was the son of the dead younger brother making them eat dirt in their own gardens. The humiliation gathered in them like a bruise that would not fade.

And in one heart above all, the bruise turned to something darker. Duryodhana, eldest of the hundred, born to believe the throne was his, watched Bhima toss his brothers about and felt a hatred take hold of him - a hatred that would never let go for as long as he lived.

Duryodhana brooded. He was clever and proud, and he had been told since birth that he was the firstborn of the king and therefore the rightful heir. Yet he could see the truth that the whole court whispered. Yudhishthira was the eldest of all the cousins, older than Duryodhana himself, and the people already spoke of the grave and honest Pandava as the natural king to come. Worse, the Pandavas outshone the Kauravas at almost everything - Arjuna with the bow, Bhima with sheer force, Yudhishthira with his calm wisdom.

Of all the Pandavas, it was Bhima who galled Duryodhana most. Bhima could break any Kaurava the way a man breaks a dry twig. Bhima made him look weak in front of his own brothers, in front of the servants, in front of the whole city. Duryodhana lay awake turning it over, and a cold plan began to form in him.

He reasoned it out coldly, as men do who have already decided to do wrong. Bhima was the strongest and the most dangerous of the five. If Bhima were removed, the others could be cowed or driven out. Then the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra would have no rivals, and the throne and the kingdom would be theirs without question. The whole obstacle, he told himself, was that one broad-shouldered boy. Remove the boy, and the future opened.

He did not speak his plan aloud, not even to Dushasana, his closest brother and shadow. He smiled at the Pandavas now. He invited Bhima to play, praised his strength, walked beside him with an arm thrown over his shoulder. Bhima, open-hearted and slow to suspect, took the friendship at face value and warmed to it.

But Vidura was watching. Vidura was the half-brother of Dhritarashtra and Pandu, born of a serving woman, kept from the throne by his birth, yet wiser than any king. He missed nothing that happened in that palace. He saw Duryodhana's new smiles and did not trust them, and he quietly resolved to keep his eyes open.

When the hot season came, Duryodhana saw his chance. For the sake of water sports he had a great pleasure house built at a place called Pramanakoti, on the bank of the Ganga just above the waterline, hung with cotton and wool and stocked with every object of desire. There would be swimming and games in the river, fresh garments and ornaments afterwards, and feasting when the day was done.

The boys came out in a happy crowd. The garden was beautiful - lotus ponds, shade trees heavy with blossom, soft lawns running down to the water's edge. The princes dived and splashed and raced one another across the river, and when they came out they dressed in fresh clothes, put on their ornaments and ate, and when evening fell they rested, worn out, in the pleasure house.

Duryodhana played the perfect host. He moved among his cousins with a smile, calling Bhima his dear brother, and all the while he watched and waited. In the water Bhima prevailed over all of them as he always did, ducking and hauling and outswimming every prince in the river.

But on one such day Bhima overdid it. He had exercised past even his great strength, and he had been drinking, and a heaviness crept into his limbs and a fog rolled over his mind. Wishing only to sleep, he climbed up the bank in his white garment, found a spot at the water's edge, and fell into a sleep as deep as death.

The other princes, worn out themselves, did not mark where he had gone. Only Duryodhana kept his eyes on the still, breathing shape lying alone by the dark water.

Night came down over the river garden. The games were over, the princes lay asleep in the pleasure house, and the lawns were empty. Duryodhana waited until no one was watching and only the sleeping Bhima remained beside the water.

Quietly, by himself, he came to where Bhima lay. The great boy did not stir; weariness and drink held him fast. Duryodhana took tough creepers and twisted them into thongs, and he bound Bhima hand and foot, winding the cords around his arms and his broad chest until he was trussed like a bundle of firewood. Bhima slept through all of it.

Then Duryodhana rolled him down from the bank into the river, where the water ran swift and deep. The dark current took him, and he sank without a sound beneath the moonlit surface.

Duryodhana watched the ripples close over the place where Bhima had gone under, and then there was only the smooth black surface of the river, giving nothing back. He believed his trouble was finished. A boy bound hand and foot and asleep in the swift Ganga could not come up again.

He brushed the dust from his clothes and went back to his rest, calm and satisfied. Behind him the Ganga flowed on as it always had, carrying its secret down into the dark.

But the river did not keep him. The shock of the cold water struck through the fog of sleep and drink, and beneath the surface Bhima came to himself. He found his arms pinned and his legs lashed, and the black water pressing on every side.

He did not panic. He set his great strength against the cords and strained, and the creepers that Duryodhana had twisted so carefully tore apart like cobwebs. His arms were free, then his legs. With a few mighty strokes he drove himself up through the current, and Bhima, supreme among those who wield arms, broke the surface and climbed out onto the bank, streaming water, alive.

Some tellers could not leave so plain an escape alone. They carried him down to the kingdom of the serpents beneath the river, where Aryaka, a Naga of his mother's line, welcomed him and gave him vessels of nectar holding the strength of a thousand elephants. It is a wonderful tale, and it is told still. But in the plainer telling followed here he needed no serpent's gift. He woke in the water, tore his bonds and rose, and the strength that saved him was already his own.

Duryodhana's first attempt had failed. Yet he learned nothing from it except that Bhima was harder to kill than he had thought, and he began at once to think of another way.

Some time later Bhima again lay sleeping, and Duryodhana came to him with a new weapon. He had gathered many snakes, sharp-toothed and full of venom, angry and virulent, and he loosed them on the sleeping boy and set them to bite him in all the soft places of his body.

The snakes struck again and again. But their fangs could not go in. The broad-chested Bhima was so tough of body that the teeth which would have killed any other man could not pierce his skin, and the venom ran off him like rain off a rock.

Bhima woke to find serpents writhing all over him. He sprang up and killed every one of them, until not one was left alive.

Now there could be no pretending it was chance. From that day Bhima and his companions grew careful, watching where they slept and who came near them.

Duryodhana tried again, and this time he reached for the deadliest thing he could find. He had poison mixed into Bhima's food, kalakuta, freshly made, so virulent that it made the hair stand up on the body.

But Duryodhana was not the only son of Dhritarashtra who knew what was being done. Yuyutsu, the king's son by a Vaishya woman, could not stomach the plot, and he warned the sons of Pritha so that no harm should come to them.

And yet Bhima ate the food, and the kalakuta went into him. It had no effect. The poison that was meant to kill him Bhima simply digested, as though it were ordinary fare, and he rose from the meal unharmed.

So three times Duryodhana had struck at him, with the river, with the serpents and with the poison, and three times Bhima had come through untouched. Duryodhana and his allies would go on to try many other means to destroy the Pandavas, but the brothers came to know of every one of them.

When the brothers put together what had happened, the cords in the river, the snakes and the poisoned food, and saw Duryodhana behind all of it, a heavy silence fell. Yudhishthira's grave face grew graver still. Bhima's eyes flashed, and his new-won strength stirred in him like a storm wanting to break. He was for going at once to confront the Kauravas and repay the deed.

But Yudhishthira held him back. The eldest Pandava, even as a boy, weighed every action against what was wise and what was right. To accuse the king's son openly, with no witness but Bhima's own word, would split the house in two and might bring ruin on them all. He counselled patience and silence, and Bhima, though it cost him, obeyed his elder brother.

Kunti went to Vidura and told him the whole story. Vidura listened, unsurprised, for he had read Duryodhana's heart from the start. He confirmed gently what they now all feared - that the prince meant the Pandavas harm and would try again. But he urged the same hard course as Yudhishthira. "Speak of this to no one," he said. "If you accuse him, you cannot prove it, and you will only sharpen his hatred and arm him with the king's favor. Bury this. Watch his hands. Guard your food, your sleep, your water. Trust few, and be ready."

It was bitter counsel, but it was wise, and they took it. The Pandavas said nothing. They smiled at their cousins, ate at the same tables, swam in the same river, and let Duryodhana believe his crime forgotten - while in truth they had learned, once and for all, exactly what kind of cousin he was.

So the first attempts on the Pandavas' lives passed in silence, hidden beneath the smooth surface of the royal household. But a thing had changed that could never change back. The two houses now knew themselves to be enemies, even as they lived under one roof, and the seed of the great war to come had been planted deep in the soil of Hastinapura.

Bhishma saw that the princes were growing fast and that their wild strength needed shaping. Untaught power was a danger, both to the boys themselves and to the kingdom. It was time they learned the disciplines of the warrior - the bow, the sword, the mace, the chariot, and the calm command of all of them. So Bhishma sought out teachers worthy of the Kuru princes.

The first was Kripa, a Brahmin of mysterious birth, found as an infant in a clump of reeds and raised in the palace. Kripa was a master of arms, and under him the hundred Kauravas and the five Pandavas began their training in earnest. The riverside grounds outside Hastinapura now rang each morning with the twang of bowstrings and the clatter of practice weapons.

Then fortune, in the shape of a fallen ball, brought them a greater master still. One day the princes were at play when their ball rolled into a dry well too deep to reach. As they stood helpless at the rim, a lean, dark Brahmin passing by laughed at them. "Princes of the Kurus," he said, "and you cannot fetch your own ball?" He took a blade of grass, charged it with a whispered spell, and cast it down; it pierced the ball. A second blade pierced the first, and a third the second, until a chain of grass-stems lay linked from his hand to the ball, and he drew it up.

The astonished boys ran to tell Bhishma, who knew at once who the stranger must be. It was Drona, son of the sage Bharadvaja, the greatest master of weapons in the whole of Bharatavarsha. Bhishma welcomed him with honor and made him the royal preceptor of the princes, and from that day the boys' true training began.

Under Drona the cousins were drilled side by side - and side by side their differences sharpened. Bhima took to the mace as if born holding one; Yudhishthira mastered the chariot and the spear; the twins Nakula and Sahadeva grew swift and deadly with the sword; and Arjuna, of them all, showed such genius with the bow that Drona's heart fastened upon him. The Kauravas, watching the master favor a Pandava above them, felt the old envy flare hotter than ever.

So the princes grew toward manhood in the training grounds of Hastinapura, and to the eyes of the city they were a single shining company of cousins, the pride of the Kuru line. But Drona, who watched them closely, saw the truth beneath. He saw how Duryodhana and his brothers drew always to one side and the five Pandavas to the other; how a game of arms could turn in a heartbeat into something with a real edge to it; how the cousins' laughter had a brittleness in it now.

The attempts on Bhima's life had not been forgotten by anyone who knew of it, however little was spoken aloud. Bhima, mightiest of them all, made a point of besting the Kauravas at every contest of strength, no longer in innocent play but with a hard satisfaction, repaying the river in his own coin. Duryodhana matched him hatred for hatred, and his envy of the Pandavas only deepened as they outshone his brothers at every turn under Drona's eye.

Vidura watched it all with a heavy heart. He saw two rivers running through one house, and he knew that one day they must meet and flood. He spoke when he could to Dhritarashtra, counselling fairness to the fatherless Pandavas, but the blind king loved his own sons too dearly and too blindly to check them. Bhishma held the family together by the sheer weight of his presence and his vows, yet even he could not reach into the hearts of the young men and pull out the poison that had taken root there.

For the wrongs done to Bhima had taught the Pandavas to trust no kindness from their cousins, and the failure of those wrongs had taught Duryodhana only that he must strike harder and surer the next time. Neither lesson made for peace. The house of Kuru was one house in name and two in truth, and everyone who had eyes to see could feel the storm gathering far off, still soundless, but growing.

Thus passed the childhood of the princes at Hastinapura. It began with a hundred and five boys playing in a marble nursery and ended with two armed camps under one roof, waiting. The friendship that should have bound the cousins had curdled into rivalry, the rivalry into hatred, and the hatred into a wound that no tutor's lesson and no elder's wisdom could heal. The seeds of the great war had been sown in the gardens and the river of their boyhood, and in their season those seeds would grow into Kurukshetra.