Tears of the Mothers

The clatter of Kurukshetra lay frozen at last. Eighteen days of slaughter had swept away eleven divisions of the Kauravas and seven of the Pāṇḍavas, and resolved themselves into a silent, blood-soaked waste of bones and ashes. And into this wilderness of grief the blind king Dhritarāshtra came trudging, his sightless eyes weeping uselessly for the hundred sons he had sacrificed to his doting attachment; and beside him walked Gāndhārī, her eyes still bound, and with them thousands of bereaved women whose lamentations tore the sky.

The field that had been a pageant of proud banners was now a monument to human pride and its cost.

Sanjaya, the faithful minister whose divine battlefield-sight had ended with the war, stood by the king, and sought to console him: words of consolation, he said gently, do not remove a mourner's grief; thousands have given their lives here for your sons; it is time now to perform the funeral rites for the dead. And the great sage Vyāsa, progenitor and detached witness of the whole Kuru line, came tenderly to the king and sought to lift his mind from the shell of grief to the eternal truth of the soul.

There is nothing I can teach you that you do not know, he said. You know that all who are born must die. This great battle came to relieve the earth of its burden, as I have heard from the Lord himself; it could not have been prevented. Henceforth Yudhishthira is your son; love him, and bear the burden of your life, and give up your grief.

And Yudhishthira, now the undisputed monarch of a desolated empire, came through the weeping crowds to his blind uncle and bowed for a father's embrace. And Dhritarāshtra opened his arms and clasped him; but there was no love in that embrace. It was the heavy, formal embrace of an elder bound by the laws of family, while within he still burned with unresolved grief for Duryodhana and Duhshāsana.

And the story does not pretend otherwise, for it is honest about the aftermath of such a war: that victory does not heal the wounds it makes, that the embrace between the winner and the bereaved father was hollow, and that the peace after Kurukshetra was not joy but only exhaustion and grief laid over an unhealed hatred.