Meanwhile, when Yudhishtira was born the news came swiftly to Dhritarashtra that Pandu had a son. The blind Kuru was king in Hastinapura, but he was always conscious that he was king in little more than name. He was still childless and though he loved Pandu he was unhappy that his younger brother had become a father before him. Kshatriya dharma was clear that the firstborn prince in each generation would become king. Gandhari was even more distraught than her husband to hear Kunti had a son, whose father, rumors whispered, was a Deva. She was most aggrieved because she herself had been pregnant for a year.
A year before this time, brought once more by destiny, Vyasa arrived in his son's sabha. Travel-worn and drawn, came the enlightened visitor. Gandhari looked after him in the palace; and even more than by her caring hospitality, Vyasa was moved by how she went with her eyes bound to share Dhritarashtra's blindness. Vyasa blessed her with a boon.
"You will have a hundred sons, each one as strong as Dhritarashtra."
But a pang gripped his heart even as he spoke, as if he was not blessing Gandhari but cursing her to a horrible fate. But then, she fell at his feet and thanked him joyfully and he was consoled. Gandhari and Dhritarashtra found their love kindled by Vyasa's prophecy. One morning soon, the queen came to her husband and taking his hand, placed it shyly on her stomach. She whispered, "Your son grows in here, my lord. Already I can feel he will be as strong as his father."
Dhritarashtra declared a celebration in Hastinapura. Nine months passed; Gandhari had to be confined in bed, where she lay in intense discomfort and often in pain. Her child—or children if Vyasa's prediction was true—was monstrously heavy. The weight inside her was dark and leaden and her dreams were so evil she was afraid to fall asleep.
At the end of a painful year came the news from the forest that Kunti was already a mother. Gandhari's screams rang through the harem; fate had cheated her. In agony anyway at her morbid pregnancy, the queen became hysterical. She struck herself again and again in her belly, until she began to bleed. As she fainted, she was aborted of a seething mass of flesh that was hard as a rock and stank of contagion.
Groaning dementedly in her bed, she ordered the putrescent lump cast into the forest. A maid was carrying the wretched thing out, when suddenly Vyasa appeared at the palace-gates. His face twitch- ing, he accosted the young woman and cried, "What is it? Where are you taking it?"
She drew back the cloth that covered the shapeless flesh. "My queen was aborted of this an hour ago."
Vyasa caught his breath. Seizing the maid's arm, hurting her in his urgency, he brought her back into the palace. The rishi shouted to the women of the harem, "Give me a hundred earthen vats of warm oil. Put them in a hidden chamber. Hurry! There isn't a moment to lose."
Gandhari appeared there, disheveled and sobbing. She cried, "Muni, you said I would have a hun- dred sons, each as strong as my husband. Instead I have borne this putrid lump of flesh."
But Vyasa said, "Go back to your bed, woman. A hundred sons you shall have. The words of Vyasa Dwaipayana have never yet been proved vain."
When the earthen vats were ready in a cellar below the harem, Vyasa took the abortion down into that chamber. He sprinkled the flesh with cold water and then patiently divided it with his hands into one hundred pieces. He gave them to a midwife to be immersed, each one in a separate vat of oil.
Gandhari also arrived in that room, in irresistible curiosity. She stood at the door, her bound face craning to the sound of Vyasa's fine hands at their strange work. The lump of flesh dwindled as he pinched off more and more thumb-sized bits. The queen counted every one from the sounds that were so clear to her powerful hearing. As he neared the end of his task, a wish flared into Gandhari's mind. "I will be the mother of a hundred mighty sons. Can't I have a daughter as well, a sister to those hundred?"
At that very moment, Vyasa had given the hundredth bit of flesh to the midwife. But he still had one final piece left in his hand. As if he divined her thought, her father-in-law said to Gandhari, "I have placed a hundred pieces of the flesh you bore in vats of oil. They shall be your sons. But I have one small piece left; let this be your daughter."
A hundred and first vat was called for and Vyasa gave the midwife that final shred of flesh to sink in it. The moment this was done, a susurrus filled that cellar, as of countless bees buzzing. The startled midwife saw those hundred and one earthen vats glow dully, with a malignant aura. Vyasa came out of that room and said quietly to Gandhari, "The future has been set in motion."
Blessing Gandhari and Dhritarashtra, that they may find the strength to bear the trial that lay ahead of them, Vyasa went away from Hastinapura. He wended his way back to the Himalayas, which are cosmic masters of the Spirit dwelling on earth as towering mountains. There, he would per- form a tapasya to save the world. That rishi, who saw deep and far in time, already realized the danger those hundred vats contained, especially the first of them, in which the piece of flesh was somewhat larger than in the others.
The pieces of flesh grew into tiny human fetuses. They grew in those vats of oil as if in a hundred and one women's wombs. As they grew, their weird luster filled the cellar, which Gandhari had sealed as Vyasa instructed her to. That light was like an evil sun risen in the bowels of Hastinapura.
Another year passed and it was the same night when, in a faraway forest, Kunti gave birth to Bheema. It was a night when uncanny fires rose from the earth around the city of the Kurus and spumed into the sky in livid geysers. Wild beasts from deep jungles, wolves and black panthers with gleaming eyes, jackals and hyena-packs, came crowding and baying into the city's streets as soon as the sun had set. Crows, vultures and other birds of carrion flew down in teeming swarms and settled on the terraces of the palace. Twisting cyclones that are seen only out at sea and other winds, dust-laden and flecked with sulfur, lashed the city of elephants. Squadrons of vampire bats, flown from some hell to greet their master to be born, obscured the face of the full moon. The planets hid themselves in the sky and a thousand spirit-hosts stalked the land, while it rained glowing, hissing drops of blood and flames. In the cellar below Dhritarashtra's palace, the first of the one hundred and one vats burst open with a report that reverberated through the passages and brought Gandhari and her midwife running.
When they unlocked the door and went in, the maid cried out in fear. There on the cold floor, in a pool of luminous slime, lay an immense child. His terrible serpent's eyes were wide open and stared at them unwinkingly. Those eyes belonged to a Demon of the pit that had taken a human form to become the bane of the earth. The child's body glowed with the same macabre aura that colored the fetal slime in which he lay. The sinister infant gave a dismal cry and the poor midwife felt her blood turn to ice. That cry was not in the least human, but the long scream of a feral beast.
Outside, there arose the greeting of the night—the grunts, wails, howls, chatters, roars, growls, shrill ululations, the manic laughter and a million wing-beats of the animals and birds of darkness congregated to welcome their lord into the world. And he called back to them, his creatures, in a dev- ilish voice that was all their voices at once: bat's screech, wolf's bay, hyena's deranged cackle, bray and growl, roar and howl, in vile cacophony.
At which din, the second vat burst open and then quickly the third and the fourth; and then, two, three and more, all at once. Gandhari and the midwife shrank back in fear. Now the king came down into that chamber with Vidura. Vidura stood horrified to see those children of hell lying in their slime, while their creatures outside still howled their welcome through the shocked night.
Fortunately for them, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari saw nothing of what happened in that cellar; but Vidura's gaze never left the first and biggest of those hundred and one infants. That monstrous child grinned with needle teeth; his green eyes were on fire. Grunting like a pig, he had already man- aged to pull himself into a sitting posture. He sat fondling himself lewdly, while all around him the earthen vats continued to burst open, until the last one, from which a little girl was born. All those children howled back at the night, in a bizarre chorus.
Feeling suddenly weak, Dhritarashtra grasped Vidura's arm and said, "Take me out of here!"
But Gandhari stood rooted. Soft mother's joy was upon her and she said to the midwife, "Give me my first son and my daughter. Don't you hear them crying? They are hungry."
She heard no wolf howl, no bat screech, or hyena cackle from her children's throats. By the sub- lime mystery of motherhood, she heard only human babies crying to be fed. She squatted on the floor and bared her breasts for her son and her daughter. They fastened greedy lips to her flesh and fed voluptuously.
In his lamplit sabha, Dhritarashtra shivered as if he had a fever. Wild visions of evil danced before his blind eyes. He saw crimsoned battlefields, where corpses lay piled like hills and blood flowed in rills. He saw them as clearly as sighted men see the light and the events of day. Only Vidura stood beside his brother and he knew what this night presaged. Vidura already saw what must be the tragic future of their royal House, founded by Manu, the lawgiver, himself.
At last, Dhritarashtra said, "My son is a year younger than Pandu's firstborn in the jungle. Yudh- ishtira will inherit the Kuru throne."1
The jackals and wolves outside howled in long unison and the night was alive with fear. The king leaned forward in his throne and whispered, "But tell me, my brother, will my son rule after Yudhish- tira's time? Vidura, I am terrified by the omens. The birds and beasts of death have flocked into Has- tinapura's streets. Listen to the wolves baying! I am told occult fires leap into the sky from the earth's belly and the very world quakes, as if in fear at my children's birth. What does it all mean, Vidura? Do my sons seem strange to those who can see?"
Vidura said softly, "The omens mean only one thing, Dhritarashtra: that your firstborn son will be the ruin of the House of Kuru. It is for him that the dog-packs bay and the wolves howl and the bats of hell wheel in dizzy circles. The omens cry that he is the terrible one of whom the old prophecies warned. He will destroy everything that has been held sacred through the ages and fetch doom to this holy land."
Dhritarashtra breathed, "What can I do to keep doom away?
"What you will not do, my lord. You can sacrifice your son. Kill him tonight."
The blind king gasped. Vidura went on, "The wise have always said an individual may be sacri- ficed for the good of the family, a family for the good of the village, the village for the country. And everything, even the world itself, may be sacrificed for the sake of the immortal soul. O my brother, it is for the soul of mankind that this monstrous child of yours has come from the depths of hell: to cor- rupt and to destroy. Kill him now and I swear his brothers will be harmless. And you can enjoy them, ninety-nine fine princes. But him you must not leave alive."
But that child, of whom the darkest prophecies told, was Dhritarashtra's firstborn. Vidura was right to assume that his brother would never do what he asked.
The same night, a vaishya woman in Dhritarashtra's harem was also delivered of a son sired by the blind king. That child was named Yuyutsu. And so Dhritarashtra had one hundred and one sons and a daughter whom they named Dussala. And his eldest, the Demon, was Duryodhana2.
As they grew into strapping young princes, the king was pleased with his powerful boys. He laughed in joy to think of the hundred of them and Gandhari rejoiced as well.
