your bridge home
The Great Epics
The war was already terrifying. Then you notice that the old men of the family were fighting too.
He gave up the throne of Hastinapura and left the country. Ninety years later he came back to die for it.
Bahlika was the son of Pratipa and the elder brother of Shantanu.
Which means that by ordinary succession, Hastinapura should have been his.
He did not take it. He went instead to his mother's family in Balkh, the Bahlika country, in the far north-west, beyond the Indus, and inherited that kingdom from his maternal uncle, and stayed.
So Shantanu became king of the Kurus because his elder brother had gone somewhere else.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.