The story

The whole Mahabharata is told to one listener, King Janamejaya, and here the storyteller stops to tell him how his own father was born dead.

After the war, in the palace assembly hall, Arjuna made an odd confession to Krishna: what you taught me before the battle, he said, I have lost. Tell it to me again. Krishna was displeased. He could not say it again in full, he answered; he had spoken it while joined in yoga. Instead he told an old story of a brahmana's teaching on release, the Anugita or "later song", and then went home to Dvaraka.

In Hastinapura the grief had not ended. Uttara, King Virata's daughter and Abhimanyu's widow, was carrying his child. The child had already been struck once. At the end of the night raid Ashvatthama had turned his weapon on the wombs of the Pandava women, and Krishna had promised that the child would live. Now Uttara would not eat, day after day, and the child inside her began to waste away.

Vyasa saw it with his inner sight and came. Put away this grief, he told her. A son of great power will be born to you, by Krishna's power and by my word, and after the Pandavas he will rule the earth. After that the child grew in the womb the way the moon grows in the bright half of the month. Then Vyasa urged the horse sacrifice, and the brothers rode north to fetch the gold for it.

While they were away, Krishna came back to Hastinapura with Balarama, Subhadra and the Vrishni warriors, and while he was there the child was born.

He was born a corpse, motionless, struck by the brahmastra. The shout of joy that went up at the birth filled every quarter and then fell silent.

Krishna hurried into the women's apartments with Satyaki. Kunti was running towards him, crying out to him to hurry, with Draupadi, Subhadra and the wailing women behind her. You are our refuge, she said, and this whole family rests on you. Your sister's grandson has been born dead, killed by Ashvatthama. You promised, on the day of the reed weapon, that you would bring the dead-born child back to life. Every life in this house, and the offerings to Pandu and the ancestors, hang on him. Uttara keeps repeating what Abhimanyu told her: that their son would go to the Vrishnis to learn archery, weapons and the craft of kings. Then Kunti raised her arms and fell to the ground, and the other women fell with her.

Subhadra was harder still. Look at your nephew's son, she said, born dead when the Kurus are dead. That reed was raised against Bhima, and it fell on Uttara, on Arjuna, and on me, and it is still burning in my heart. If you have given your word and do not keep it, count me among the dead. You could bring the three worlds back to life; how much more one child of your own blood.

Krishna answered aloud: so be it. The text says the words came to the household like water to people faint with heat.

He went into the birth chamber, and the epic lingers on what he saw: white garlands, full pots of water on every side, torches, mustard seed, bright weapons laid out, fires, old women and skilled physicians, and the things that keep demons away. Krishna saw it and said: well done. Draupadi told Uttara that Krishna was coming, and Uttara swallowed her tears.

What she said was not a prayer. Look at us, she said: Abhimanyu and I have been destroyed together. I promised on the battlefield that I would follow my husband soon, and I did not, because I loved my life too much; what will he say to me now? If the king, or Bhima, or you had only said, let the reed kill the mother who knows nothing, I alone would have died and this would not have happened. Then she took the dead child into her lap and spoke to him. You are the son of a man who knew dharma, she said, and here you are, failing to greet the lord of the Vrishnis. She fell again, and the women lifted her, and she bowed to Krishna with folded hands.

Krishna touched water and drew the brahmastra back. Then he made a declaration of truth, staking everything he was on it. I have never spoken a lie, he said, not even in jest. I have never turned back in battle. Dharma and the brahmanas are dear to me. I have never once quarrelled with Arjuna. Truth and dharma are always established in me. Kamsa and Keshi died at my hands by right. By that truth, let this child live.

Slowly, the child began to move.

The blazing weapon went back to Brahma, the demons fled the house, and a voice from the sky said: well done, Keshava. The women felt, the text says, like people who had found a boat in deep water. Uttara bowed to Krishna with her son in her arms, and he gave her a great many jewels.

Krishna named him: born when the family had wasted away, parikshina, he would be called Parikshit. The child grew, and everyone who saw him was glad. He was a month old when the Pandavas came home with the gold.

The frame of the whole epic depends on this chapter. The war had used up a generation of sons. Draupadi's five sons died in the night raid and Abhimanyu died inside the wheel, and this one child, struck before he was born, was the only heir the Kuru throne had left. He lived because Krishna's word was good. Parikshit will rule after the Pandavas, and his son Janamejaya will one day sit at a serpent sacrifice and hear all of this from Vaishampayana, including the day his father was given back.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Parikshit — Arjuna's grandson, killed in the womb by Ashvatthama's weapon and revived by Krishna, whose own death starts the telling of the epic.
• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• Kunti — Mother of three Pandavas and, before any of them, of the son she set adrift on a river and had to watch her other children fight.
• Draupadi — Won in a contest she had no say in, married to five men on a careless word, and the only person in the hall who asks a question of law.
• Vyasa — The poet of the epic and the father of its two kings, who keeps walking into his own story to tell its people what is coming.
• Arjuna — The archer the whole war is arranged around, who arrives at its opening unable to lift his bow because of who is standing on the other side.
• Theme: Curse and consequence
• Theme: Kinship and enmity

Elsewhere in this parva

• The horse sacrifice and the golden mongoose — Yudhishthira performs the richest rite in the epic, and a half-golden mongoose says one poor family's barley meal was worth more

Questions to explore

• How did Krishna bring Parikshit back to life, and why does he swear by his truth rather than use a weapon?
• Why did Arjuna ask Krishna to repeat the Gita, and why did Krishna refuse?
• What does the name Parikshit mean, and why is this birth so important to the frame of the whole epic?