The story

The Pandavas were already on the road home when the messenger caught up with them.

Draupadi's two boons had undone the first game. Dhritarashtra had freed her husbands, returned their wealth, asked Yudhishthira to forget Duryodhana's harsh words, and sent them back to Indraprastha with his blessing. It did not last. Duhshasana ran to his brother with the news: the old man was giving away everything they had won with so much effort.

Duryodhana, Karna and Shakuni went straight to the king. Their argument was fear dressed as policy. The Pandavas, Duryodhana said, were angry snakes, and nobody who has angry snakes at his throat lets them go. Arjuna was riding out with his quivers open and kept reaching for the Gandiva. Bhima had yoked his chariot with his mace raised. Nobody would forgive what had been done to Draupadi. So play once more, for exile. The losers would go to the forest for twelve years, dressed in deerskins, and spend a thirteenth year unrecognised among people. If anyone recognised them, they would go back to the forest for another twelve. In thirteen years, Duryodhana said, he could make his hold on the kingdom secure, and beat them if they ever came back.

Dhritarashtra agreed at once. Bring them back, he said, even if they are far down the road.

The text makes sure we hear who objected. Drona, Somadatta, Bahlika, Vidura, Ashvatthama, Yuyutsu, Bhurishravas, Bhishma and Vikarna all said: no dice, let there be peace. Gandhari spoke hardest. When Duryodhana was born, she reminded her husband, he cried like a jackal, and Vidura advised them to abandon him. Do not let a child's opinion lead you, she said, and do not become the cause of your family's destruction. Dhritarashtra's answer is one of the bleakest lines in the book. If the family must end, let it end. I cannot stop it.

Yudhishthira's reply to the summons is short. Creatures meet good and bad by the Ordainer's decree, he said; if he must play again, there is no escape from it. The summons came from the old king, and he could not disobey it even though he knew it would bring ruin. The narrator adds two things. Yudhishthira went back knowing about Shakuni's tricks. And he went from shame and attachment to dharma, still hoping that the destruction of the Kurus might be avoided. In the hall, people murmured that his kinsmen should have warned him. He asked how a king who keeps his own dharma could turn back from a challenge, and agreed to play.

Shakuni proposed one stake and one throw: twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth in hiding, with discovery meaning twelve more. Yudhishthira accepted. Shakuni threw, and announced that he had won.

The Pandavas took off their royal clothes and put on deerskins. Duhshasana could not leave it there. They were like sesame seeds with no oil in them, he said, and he told Draupadi to choose a better husband from the Kurus. Then he danced around Bhima, calling him a cow. As the brothers left, Duryodhana copied Bhima's lion-like walk.

Bhima turned half round, and the vows began. He swore that he would kill Duryodhana with his mace and put his foot on his head, that he would drink Duhshasana's blood, that Arjuna would kill Karna and Sahadeva would kill Shakuni. Arjuna answered that good men do not prove themselves with words. In the fourteenth year from now, he said, the earth would drink the blood of Duryodhana, Karna, Shakuni and Duhshasana, and he himself would kill Karna. The Himalaya might move and the sun lose its light, but his word would not change if the kingdom was not returned in the fourteenth year. Sahadeva told Shakuni that the dice he trusted were really sharp arrows, and swore to kill him. Nakula vowed to rid the earth of the sons of Dhritarashtra who had spoken harshly to Draupadi.

Yudhishthira took leave of the elders one by one. Out of shame, nobody answered him. Only Vidura spoke. Kunti would stay in his house, he said, and he gave the brothers a blessing and one sentence worth keeping: a man defeated by unrighteous means does not suffer from his defeat. Kunti's farewell was grief without restraint. If she had known, she said, she would never have come to Hastinapura after Pandu died.

Vidura then described the departure to Dhritarashtra, and the description is one of the most powerful images in the Sabha Parva. Yudhishthira walked with his face covered, so that his angry eyes would not burn the people he looked at. Bhima walked with his great arms spread wide. Arjuna scattered sand as he went, as his arrows would later scatter. Sahadeva had smeared his face so that no one would know him that day, and Nakula had covered himself with dust so that he would not steal women's hearts on the road. Draupadi wept behind her loose hair, in one bloodstained garment. In the fourteenth year, she said, the wives of the men who did this would enter Hastinapura in the same state, with their sons and husbands dead. The priest Dhaumya walked ahead with kusha grass in his hand, singing the Saman chants to Yama, the god of death. The Kurus' own priests, he said, would sing them like this when the Bharatas lay dead.

There was lightning from a clear sky, and the earth shook. Narada appeared in the hall and said that in the fourteenth year the Kauravas would perish. Drona told Duryodhana that his happiness would last about as long as the shade of a palm tree in winter.

The second game is short, but it sets the clock that the rest of the epic runs on. The first game showed what a rigged contest could take. The second fixed a term of thirteen years, and when the term ended, the vows sworn at this door would fall due.

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.
• 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.
• Duryodhana — The eldest Kaurava, who never disputes that the kingdom is contested and never concedes that this makes the Pandavas' claim equal to his.
• Shakuni — Gandhari's brother and Duryodhana's strategist, who takes a kingdom without a weapon by being better at a game nobody was allowed to refuse.
• Duhshasana — Duryodhana's brother, who dragged Draupadi into the assembly by her hair and paid for it on the battlefield exactly as Bhima had sworn.
• 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.
• Vidura — The half-brother kept from the throne by his mother's rank, who gives the correct advice at every turn and is overruled at every turn.
• Theme: Dice and dispossession
• Theme: The binding vow
• Theme: Counsel that goes unheeded

Elsewhere in this parva

• The slaying of Jarasandha — A king gathering a hundred kings for sacrifice cannot be hurt by weapons, so Bhima kills him bare-handed on a hint from Krishna.
• The Rajasuya sacrifice — Yudhishthira's consecration as emperor — the height of the Pandavas' fortune, and the sight that decides Duryodhana to act.
• The game of dice — A king who cannot refuse a challenge plays against a loaded opponent, and stakes his brothers, his wife and himself.
• Draupadi in the assembly — Dragged into a full court, the queen puts a question of law to the elders — and every one of them declines to answer it.

Questions to explore

• Why did Yudhishthira go back to play again after Draupadi had won their freedom?
• What vows did the Pandavas swear as they left for the forest?
• Why did Dhritarashtra recall them when every elder told him not to?