The story

The women of the Kuru house had lived so far inside the palace that, the epic says, not even the gods had seen them. Now they walked out through the streets with their hair loose and their ornaments thrown off.

Dhritarashtra had sent for Gandhari and for all the widows of the house, and he led them out of Hastinapura toward the field. On the road the old king met the last three men of his army, Kripa, Ashvatthama and Kritavarma. They told Gandhari what they had done in the night to the sleeping Pandava camp, and then they scattered.

The Pandavas came to meet him with Krishna. The women surrounded Yudhishthira and asked where his famous knowledge of dharma had gone. He went through them and bowed to his uncle. Dhritarashtra embraced him without warmth. Then he asked for Bhima.

Krishna had read his intention before he spoke. He pulled Bhima aside and put into the blind king's arms an iron statue of Bhima, a figure Duryodhana had had made. Dhritarashtra crushed it. He had the strength of ten thousand elephants, and he broke the iron and bruised his own chest, and blood ran from his mouth as he fell. Sanjaya held him. When his anger had gone, he began to cry out for Bhima, grieving for the man he believed he had just killed.

Krishna told him the truth. You would have killed him, he said, and it would not have brought back one of your sons. He reminded the king that he knew the duties of kings and had still let his son lead him. Dhritarashtra admitted that love for his son had shaken him. Then he embraced Bhima, Arjuna and the twins, and wept over them.

Gandhari was harder. She wanted to curse Yudhishthira, and Vyasa came before she could. He reminded her of something. For eighteen days, Duryodhana had come to her and asked for her blessing on his victory, and each day she had answered with one line: yato dharmas tato jayah, where dharma is, there is victory. She had never spoken falsely. Let her not begin now.

She said she did not blame the brothers for the war. What burned in her was one blow. Bhima had struck her son below the navel, in a fight where that was forbidden. Bhima answered her, frightened. He had done it out of fear, he said, because Duryodhana could not be beaten fairly, and because Duryodhana had once bared his thigh to Draupadi in the hall. She asked about Duhshasana's blood. Bhima said it had gone no further than his lips and teeth, and Yama knew it; only his hands had been red. Then she asked the question no one could answer. He had killed a hundred sons. Could he not have left one, a single staff for two blind old people?

Yudhishthira came to her trembling. I am the cruel man who killed your sons, he said. Curse me. She said nothing. As he bent toward her feet, her eyes fell from under the edge of her blindfold on the tips of his toes, and his nails, which had been beautiful, were blighted at once. Arjuna stepped behind Krishna. Then her anger left her, and she comforted them like a mother.

Vyasa gave her divine sight, and from where she stood she saw the whole field as if it were close. The women went out to it in their carriages and threw themselves down among the dead. They stumbled over bodies. Jackals, crows and vultures were feeding. Gandhari spoke to Krishna and named what she saw.

She fell like a cut plantain tree beside Duryodhana. She remembered her own words to him, where dharma is, there is victory. Vultures now sat around the king whom kings had sat around, she said, and birds fanned him with their wings where women had once fanned him with fans. His wife sat by him, the mother of his son Lakshmana, who lay dead beside his father. She breathed on the boy's head and wiped her husband's face with her hand. The young Uttara held Abhimanyu's bloody head in her lap and spoke to him as if he were alive: we had six months together, and in the seventh you were gone. Kripi, Drona's wife, sat with matted hair beside her husband.

At the end Gandhari turned to Krishna. You had the power, she said, and armies, and you had heard all the counsel. You could have stopped it on either side, and you let the Kurus and the Pandavas destroy each other. By whatever merit she had earned through serving her husband, she cursed him. In the thirty-sixth year, Krishna's own kinsmen would kill each other. Krishna himself, after his kin, his counsellors and his sons were dead, would wander in the forest and die by a contemptible means. The women of his house would fall on the ground as the women of the Bharatas were falling now.

Krishna answered her with a faint smile. No one but he could destroy the clan of the Vrishnis, he said, and he knew it already. Neither men nor gods could kill the Yadavas, so they would die by each other's hands. She had asked for what was already settled. The Pandavas were terrified. Then Krishna told her to stand up. The Kurus had died through her own fault, he said, because she had honoured a wicked son. He ended with a harsh verse: a brahmin woman bears a child for austerity, a cow bears an ox for the plough, and a princess like her bears sons to be killed. Gandhari said nothing more.

Here the war is finally counted, not in armies but in widows, and the counting ends without comfort. Gandhari's curse runs forward thirty-six years to the shore where the Yadavas will fall on each other. Krishna accepts it before anyone else understands it, and the women's mourning becomes a sentence the epic will carry out.

Who appears, and what it argues

• 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.
• 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.
• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• 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.
• 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.
• Duryodhana — The eldest Kaurava, who never disputes that the kingdom is contested and never concedes that this makes the Pandavas' claim equal to his.
• Theme: Curse and consequence
• Theme: Kinship and enmity

Elsewhere in this parva

• The water offerings — At the Ganga, with the dead already burned, Kunti tells her sons that the enemy Arjuna killed was their eldest brother.

Questions to explore

• Why does Gandhari curse Krishna and not the Pandavas who killed her sons?
• Why does Krishna accept Gandhari's curse instead of resisting it?
• What did Gandhari mean when she told her son "where dharma is, there is victory"?