Kunti laments over her sons and they depart for the forest
Following her weeping daughter-in-law, Kunti sees her sons for the last time before exile: shamed, dressed in deer skins, surrounded by enemies. She unleashes a torrent of grief, questioning fate, dharma, and her own choices, before they comfort her and walk into the forest.
Draupadi wept as she left. Kunti, Pritha, followed her, moving through her own grief. Then she saw them.
Her sons. All five of them. Deprived of their ornaments and royal garments, their bodies were covered in the rough skins of ruru deer. Their faces were lowered in shame. They stood in a cruel tableau: surrounded by delighted enemies and mourning well-wishers, the victors and the vanquished sharing the same space for a final moment.
Driven by affection, Kunti approached her sons in that state. In words of great lamentation, she spoke to them and to the relatives gathered around.
She catalogued their virtues, as if reciting them could ward off the reality before her. “You have always followed good dharma. You have always been adorned by fortitude in conduct. You have never been mean. You have always been firm and devoted. You have always been respectful of the gods.” Then came the agonized question: “Why should this calamity befall you? Why should there be this reversal in fortune? I do not see whose envy and wickedness have led to this.”
She turned the blame inward. “Because I have given birth to you, all this may be because of my ill fortune. So despite possessing supreme qualities, you are suffering the oppression of limitless grief.”
Her mind went to practical, maternal fears. “You do not lack in valour, strength, courage, energy and fortitude. But thin of body, and deprived of your riches, how will you live in that desolate forest?”
Then came the regret that rewrote her entire life. “If I had known that you were destined to live in the forest, after Pandu’s death, I would not have brought you down from the Shatashringa Mountains to Gajasahrya.” She had brought them from the safety of the hermitage to the deadly politics of the Kuru court, believing it was their destiny. Now it seemed like a fatal error.
She looked at the dead and the departed with new eyes. “I think your father was fortunate. His mind was set on austerities and wisdom. His mind was set on going to heaven before he encountered misery because of his sons.” Pandu had died young, spared this sight. “I think that Madri, knowledgeable in dharma and virtuous in every way, was fortunate. She had the foresight of knowing what was going to happen and attained supreme salvation.” Madri, her co-wife, had chosen to die on Pandu’s pyre.
Finally, she condemned her own will to live. “Love and thoughts and purpose determined my decision. Alas on my love for life. I suffer all this misery because of that.”
When Kunti lamented in this way, the Pandavas did not argue with fate. They comforted her. They showed her homage. Then, unhappily, they turned and set out for the forest.
Vidura and the others, who were themselves aggrieved, moved to the next duty. They consoled the afflicted Kunti. Explaining the reasons for this disaster — reasons of dharma, of fate, of human failing — and thus suffering even more themselves, they slowly led her away to Kshatta’s house, Vidura’s own home. She would not be going to the forest. She would remain in Hastinapura, a mother in the city of her sons’ enemies.