The story

When Yudhishthira heard how the Vrishnis had died, he said to Arjuna: Time cooks all creatures.

Arjuna answered with one word, said twice — Time, time — and agreed. So did Bhima and the twins. There was no council and no argument, and the text adds something unexpected: the brothers were glad.

Yudhishthira set the kingdom in order. He entrusted it to Yuyutsu, the last of Dhritarashtra's sons, and anointed Parikshit — Abhimanyu's son, the child born dead and given life — as king in Hastinapura, with Krishna's grandson Vajra ruling the Yadava remnant at Indraprastha. He told Subhadra to protect them both and never to turn her mind to adharma, wrongdoing. He made the water offerings for Krishna, Balarama and his uncle Vasudeva, gave wealth to brahmanas, and gave Parikshit to Kripa as a pupil. When he told the people what he meant to do, they were dismayed and begged him not to. He went anyway; he understood, the text says, the law of the turning of time.

They put off their ornaments and put on bark cloth. They performed a last rite and cast their sacred fires into the water. The palace women wept to see them go, as they had wept long ago when the brothers left after the dice. Ulupi went into the Ganga; Chitrangada went home to Manipura. And seven left Hastinapura: five brothers, Draupadi the sixth, and a dog the seventh.

They walked fasting, facing east, set on renunciation, through many lands, rivers and mountains: Yudhishthira first, then Bhima, then Arjuna, then the twins, and Draupadi last. The dog followed. Arjuna had not let go of Gandiva and his two inexhaustible quivers — out of greed for treasure, the text says — and at the shore of the eastern sea Agni stood across their path like a mountain and asked for them. He had fetched the bow from Varuna for the burning of Khandava; its work was done. Arjuna threw it into the water.

They turned south, then southwest, and in the west they saw Dvaraka under the sea. Then they turned north, keeping the earth on their right as one circles something holy. They saw the Himalaya, and beyond it a sea of sand, and Mount Meru.

Draupadi fell first. Her yoga failed, and she dropped to the ground. Bhima asked why: she had never done anything wrong. Yudhishthira said she had loved Arjuna more than the rest of them, and this was the fruit of it. He walked on without looking at her.

Sahadeva fell next. His fault, Yudhishthira said, was that he thought no one his equal in wisdom. Then Nakula, grieving for the two who had fallen: he had thought no one his equal in beauty. Then Arjuna: he had said he would burn up the enemy in a single day and had not done it, and he had looked down on every other archer. Then Bhima himself fell, and called out to ask why. You ate too much, Yudhishthira told him; you boasted of your strength and took no account of others. He walked on without looking back. Only the dog still followed.

Then Indra came down in a chariot whose noise filled heaven and earth, and told him to climb in.

Yudhishthira's first answer was: not without my brothers, and not without Draupadi, who is delicate and used to comfort. Indra told him they had gone ahead already, leaving their human bodies; he alone would enter heaven in his own. Then Yudhishthira said the dog must come too. It was devoted to him, and he would not be cruel.

Indra argued, and the argument is worth following. He offered immortality, equality with himself, the whole of heaven's happiness: leave the dog, there is nothing cruel in it. Heaven has no place for men with dogs; the demons called Krodhavasha carry off the merit of any rite a dog has looked at. You have already left your brothers and your wife, he said. Why can you not leave a dog?

Yudhishthira's answers do not waver. To abandon someone devoted to you, he said, is a sin as great as killing a brahmana, and he would not do it for his own happiness. As for his brothers, there is neither peace nor war with the dead. He could not bring them back to life, so he had left them — but he had not left them while they lived. Handing over someone who came for refuge, killing a woman, robbing a brahmana, betraying a friend: he held abandoning a devoted follower equal to these four.

Then the one who had followed him spoke in his own form. It was Dharma, the god of righteousness, Yudhishthira's own father. He had tested his son once before, at the lake in the Dvaitavana forest, when Yudhishthira asked for Nakula's life so that both his father's wives would have a son living. Now he had turned down the chariot of the gods for a dog. There was no one in heaven equal to him.

He rose in the chariot, in his own body, with the gods around him. Narada proclaimed that no other man had ever reached heaven so. And Yudhishthira's first words there were to ask for his brothers. Indra told him to stay in the place his deeds had won and let go of human attachment; his brothers had not reached it. Yudhishthira said he would not live there without them. He wanted to go wherever they and Draupadi had gone, good place or bad.

That is where the book stops, and it is the right place to stop. The dog was the test of the road, but this is its result: a man offered everything heaven contains, asking only to be taken to his family.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• Bhima — The strongest of the brothers, whose two vows in the assembly hall turn a property dispute into something that can only end in bodies.
• 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.
• Nakula — The fourth Pandava, Madri's son, whom Yudhishthira chooses to bring back to life ahead of his own full brothers at the yaksha's lake.
• Sahadeva — The youngest Pandava, Madri's other son, who serves Virata as a cowherd and is the first of the brothers to fall on the road north.
• 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.
• 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.
• Theme: Renunciation and release
• Theme: The impossible choice

Questions to explore

• Why did Draupadi fall first on the great journey?
• Was Yudhishthira right to walk on without looking back at his fallen brothers?
• Why would Yudhishthira give up heaven rather than abandon a dog?