The Kauravas

Impressed by Gāndhārī's devotion to her husband, the sage Vyāsa granted her a boon: that she should have a hundred sons. And she conceived; but her pregnancy went on far beyond its natural term, two whole years, and no child came. And when at last she heard the news that Kuntī had given birth to her first son, Yudhishthira, Gāndhārī was seized with frustration and grief that Kuntī's line should have the firstborn ahead of hers, and in her anguish she struck her own womb.

And at that blow there fell from her not a child but a cold, lifeless, grey mass of tissue. Horror-stricken, she called for Vyāsa; and the sage came, and did not despair, but took the lifeless mass and divided it, with great care, into exactly one hundred parts, and placed each part in an earthen pot filled with ghee, to be incubated; and when Gāndhārī asked also for a daughter, he made one part more, and set it in an extra pot. And after two years of this strange incubation, the pots began to be opened.

But when the first pot was opened, and the firstborn son emerged, the omens were terrible. The dogs of the palace began to howl; thunder rolled from a clear sky; jackals cried; every sign of ill portent appeared at once. And Bhīshma, Vidura, and Vyāsa, reading these omens, understood that this child was born to be the destroyer of his race, and they pleaded with Dhritarāshtra and Gāndhārī to do the terrible but necessary thing, to abandon this one child, to prevent the ruin of the whole family and the whole world that he would otherwise bring.

Let this one go, they begged, to save all the rest.

And Gāndhārī refused. She would not abandon her firstborn; no mother's heart, she felt, could do it; and Dhritarāshtra, doting already on the son he could not see, would not force her. And so the child was kept. This child was Duryodhana. And after him the other pots were opened, and there came forth his ninety-nine brothers, and their one sister, Duhshalā; and together these hundred sons of Dhritarāshtra were the Kauravas.

Let us mark this moment, for it is one of the great tragic hinges of the whole epic, the road not taken that would have saved the world. The wisest men of the age, reading the omens truly, told the parents plainly that this one child would destroy them all, and begged them to give him up. And the parents, out of love, out of a mother's natural refusal to abandon her child and a father's doting blindness, would not. Who can blame them? What mother could cast away her newborn on the strength of an omen?

And yet the omen was true, and the refusal, however human, however understandable, was the choice that doomed them; for Duryodhana, kept and cherished, would grow to be exactly the destroyer the omens had foretold, and the hundred sons would perish, and the race would fall, and all the rivers of blood at Kurukshetra would flow from this one moment when love could not do the terrible thing that wisdom advised.

The story does not tell us the parents were wicked to keep him; it shows us, rather, the terrible truth that love itself, unwilling to face a dreadful necessity, can be the very thing that opens the door to ruin, and that the hardest choices are precisely those where the heart and the deeper good are set against each other, as they were set here, over a newborn child in whom the whole doom of an age lay sleeping.