your bridge home
The Great Epics
A grieving mother curses the one man who could have stopped a war that killed all hundred of her sons. He doesn't argue.
She had kept a cloth over her eyes for the whole of her married life. She took it off to look at a field with a hundred of her sons lying on it.
Gandhari had been given in marriage to a man born blind.
And on the day of that wedding she bound her own eyes. And she did not unbind them.
The tradition reads it in more than one way.
As devotion. As solidarity. As a refusal to hold an advantage her husband could never have. Whatever she meant by it, she kept it for decades. She raised a hundred sons without seeing any of their faces.
She had also, more than once, told Duryodhana he was wrong. When Krishna came asking for five villages, she was sent for, and she told her own son in open court to take the terms. He did not.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.