The Wax Palace

The strength and the goodness and the rising fame of the young Pāṇḍavas filled Duryodhana with a jealousy that would not let him sleep. Urged on by his uncle Shakuni and his friend Karṇa, he pressed the blind king Dhritarāshtra to permit a plot to destroy them; and Dhritarāshtra, caught as always in his doting love for his eldest son, yielded, as he would go on yielding until it destroyed them all.

The plan was laid with care. The court began to praise the beauty of the forest-town of Vāraṇāvata and a great festival to be held there, until the unsuspecting Pāṇḍavas, wishing to please Dhritarāshtra, agreed to go as royal guests. But Duryodhana's man Purochana had gone ahead to build a palace for them, and he built it of the most combustible things: jute and lac and hemp, resin and fat and oil, the walls plastered with clay mixed with butter, the beds set where the fire would catch quickest.

The plot was simple: let the Pāṇḍavas settle in, and one night while they slept set the whole thing ablaze, and let the world call it a tragic accident.

This is the nature of envy, which the story shows us in the very fabric of that house: a silent, waiting thing, harmless-seeming, like the lac in the walls, that needs only a single spark to consume everything. Duryodhana's jealousy had been building since childhood, quiet and combustible, and now it had built a whole palace to burn his cousins in. But the wise Vidura had seen it coming, and was already at work to save the righteous sons of Pāṇḍu.