Indraprastha and the Reclaimed Desert

When it became known that the Pāṇḍavas had survived the burning of the wax palace, and they returned to Hastināpura alive, a crisis of succession arose, for now there were two sets of heirs, and Dhritarāshtra, torn as ever between his love for Duryodhana and his duty, resolved it by dividing the kingdom. And the division was itself an insult, for to the Pāṇḍavas he gave Khāṇḍavaprastha, a barren stretch of desert and ancient wasteland, desolate and unwanted, while Duryodhana kept the rich and settled heart of the realm.

To the eye of the world it was a cruel bargain, the best of the princes fobbed off with a wilderness. But the Pāṇḍavas did not complain, and here the story shows its first great turn from misfortune to triumph, for with the guidance of Lord Krishna and the labour of celestial architects they took that wasteland and transformed it, clearing and building and raising, until where there had been only desert there stood a magnificent city, Indraprastha, one of the wonders of the age.

There is a quiet teaching in this reclaiming, and it is worth pausing on before the splendours overtake it. The Pāṇḍavas were given a desert and made of it a paradise; they did not curse the poverty of their portion but poured their strength into it and made it flower. And is this not the very task of a life?

Each of us is given some barren ground, some portion we did not choose and would not have chosen, some wilderness of circumstance; and the measure of a soul is not the richness of the ground it is given but what it makes of the ground it has. The Pāṇḍavas took the worst land in the kingdom and made it the most beautiful, and in doing so they showed that the desolate places, met with the right spirit and the right help, can be made to bloom.

And the city held one marvel above the rest. Mayāsura, the great architect of the demons, whose life the Pāṇḍavas had spared, built for them a hall of assembly of such refined art that it confounded the senses: floors of polished crystal that looked like water, and pools of clear water that looked like solid floor, so that the eye could not tell the solid from the seeming.

It was a wonder; and it was also, though none yet knew it, a snare, for the confusion it worked upon the senses would one day work upon a proud guest and kindle the quarrel that would burn down the world. But that lay ahead. For now there was only the reclaimed desert turned to a shining city, and the Pāṇḍavas at the height of their fortune, and the hall of illusions gleaming at its heart, beautiful and treacherous, a fit emblem of the whole material glory that looks so solid and is built, at bottom, of deception.