The story

Back in Hastinapura, the kingdom had stopped giving the Pandavas any joy.

They took no pleasure in ruling, in their wives, or in reciting the Veda. They lay awake remembering Abhimanyu, Karna and Draupadi's sons. What kept them alive, it says, was the sight of Abhimanyu's child Parikshit.

Sahadeva said it first. He had long wanted to go, he told Yudhishthira, and had not dared to say so: he wanted to see Kunti with her hair matted, her skin torn by kusha grass. Draupadi added that she longed to see her mother-in-law, if Pritha was still alive. So the court went — army, women in litters, townspeople — across the Yamuna to the hermitage at Kurukshetra.

They found it empty; the old people had gone to the river to bathe and fetch water. Sahadeva ran ahead, weeping, and touched his mother's feet. Kunti was walking in front of Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, leading them. The blind king knew each of his nephews by voice and touch. The Pandavas took the water pots from the old people and carried them back themselves.

Then a small, telling scene. The forest ascetics had never seen these famous men and asked which one was Yudhishthira. Sanjaya — the man who had once described the whole war to a blind king — pointed them out one by one. That night the Pandavas slept on the ground around their mother and ate what the old king ate. It was on this visit that Vidura, starving himself in the forest, passed into Yudhishthira.

A month went by. Then Vyasa came and asked the old king what he wished for.

Dhritarashtra did not ask for himself. What burned him day and night was the fate of the men who had died for his son's sake. Gandhari spoke for the women. Sixteen years had passed, and her husband still could not sleep. Vyasa could make whole worlds by his austerity; surely he could show the king his sons.

Kunti, hearing this, thought of the son she had borne in secret. Vyasa saw it and asked her to speak, and in front of everyone she told the story she had kept for a lifetime: the boon from the sage Durvasa, the Sun who came when she called him out of a girl's curiosity, the child she put into the water. She had known him later, she said, and ignored him, and it burned her. Vyasa told her she bore no fault. She had become a maiden again, and the dharma of humans is not the measure of what gods do.

He told them all to go down to the Ganga at nightfall. That day, the text says, felt like a hundred years.

When night came, Vyasa entered the water and called. From inside the river rose a roar like the two armies meeting, and out of the Ganga came the dead of Kurukshetra in their thousands — Bhishma and Drona at their head, Virata and Drupada, Draupadi's sons, Abhimanyu, Ghatotkacha, Karna and Duryodhana, Shakuni, Duhshasana and his brothers. Each came in his own dress, under his own banner, in his own chariot, as on the field. But their bodies shone, and the text says three things of them in one line: they were without enmity, without pride, without anger.

Vyasa gave the blind king divine sight, and Dhritarashtra, who had never seen his sons, saw them. The crowd watched without blinking, as if at a painted scene.

Then the living and the dead met. Sons came to fathers and mothers, wives to husbands, brother to brother, friend to friend. The Pandavas went to Karna, to Abhimanyu, to Draupadi's sons, and the epic says simply that the Pandavas and Karna met in friendship. For one whole night there was no grief, no fear, no reproach. When it ended they embraced, took leave, and went back into the river with their chariots and banners, each to his own world. Vyasa, standing in the water, told the widows that any who wished to join their husbands might enter the Ganga. Many did, left their bodies there, and followed.

Afterwards Dhritarashtra sent Yudhishthira home. Seeing him, he said, made his austerity slacken. Kunti sent her sons away too: her love for them would bind her and spoil her penance. The brothers walked round the old people again and again, like calves held back from their mothers, and went.

Two years later Narada came to court with the end. The old king had moved on to Gangadvara and had fasted until he was skin and bone; Kunti had been Gandhari's eyes and Sanjaya the king's guide. One day, after they had bathed in the Ganga, a wind rose and a forest fire swept the woods. Too weak to run, Dhritarashtra told Sanjaya to save himself — death by water, fire or wind, he said, is praised for ascetics who have left home of their own will. He sat facing east with Gandhari and Kunti, his senses drawn in, still as a log, and the fire took them. Sanjaya escaped to the Himalaya.

Yudhishthira's grief turned on fire itself: Arjuna had fed Agni the whole Khandava forest, and Agni had repaid him by burning his mother. Narada corrected him. It was no stray blaze. The fires of the old king's sacrifice, left untended in the forest by his priests, had spread; he had been joined with his own fire and had gone to the highest state, and Kunti had won perfection by serving her elders. Yuyutsu, the last of Dhritarashtra's sons, stood in front when the water offerings were made.

This is the epic's gentlest reckoning with its war. The dead come back for one night and leave without anger; the elders sit still in a fire they no longer try to escape. The night gives them the reconciliation they never managed while all of them lived — and the book is honest that it lasts only until morning.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Dhritarashtra — The blind elder brother passed over for the throne and left holding it anyway, who can always see what his son is doing and never stops him.
• Gandhari — The queen who covered her eyes for life to share her husband's blindness, lost a hundred sons, and cursed the god who let it happen.
• 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.
• 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.
• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• 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.
• Karna — Kunti's first son, given away at birth and raised by a charioteer, who spends his life being told his skill does not outrank his upbringing.
• 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.
• Theme: Renunciation and release
• Theme: Kinship and enmity

Elsewhere in this parva

• The elders go to the forest — Fifteen years after the war the blind king walks out of Hastinapura with his hand on Gandhari's shoulder, and Kunti leads them both

Questions to explore

• Why did Vyasa tell Kunti she bore no fault for abandoning Karna?
• What does the night the dead return say about how the epic sees death and enmity?
• Was the forest fire that killed Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and Kunti an accident or the end they chose?