Every great river has a source, and the river of the Mahabharata begins not with a battle but with a renunciation. King Shantanu of Hastinapura, of the ancient Kuru line, married the goddess Ganga and fathered a son of rare brilliance — Devavrata, the heir-apparent. Years later, widowed, Shantanu fell in love with Satyavati, a fisherman's daughter who ferried travellers across the Yamuna. Her father set a condition that cut to the bone: he would give his daughter only if her sons, not Devavrata, would inherit the throne.

Shantanu, bound by love for his firstborn, could not ask it. So Devavrata asked it of himself. Before the fisherman he swore two oaths — that he would surrender all claim to the kingdom, and, lest his own descendants ever press a rival claim, that he would remain celibate for life. The gods are said to have rained flowers upon him, and he earned the name by which the world remembers him: Bhishma, "he of the terrible vow." His father granted him a boon in return — icchā-mṛtyu, death only when he himself willed it.

It is one of the noblest acts in the epic, and also the first turn of the screw. For a vow that magnificent removes from the kingdom its most capable man and leaves the succession to weaker hands. Satyavati's sons died without heirs. To continue the line, the sage Vyasa was called to father children by the widowed queens — and here the curse deepens. One queen shut her eyes in fear, and her son Dhritarashtra was born blind. Another grew pale, and her son Pandu was born sickly and fair. A serving-maid, calm and willing, bore the wise Vidura.

By the law of the time the blind man could not be crowned, so the younger Pandu became king while the elder Dhritarashtra waited, his resentment quietly inherited by his hundred sons. Pandu, under a sage's curse of his own, withdrew to the forest, where his five sons — the Pandavas — were born. When he died young, the cousins were raised together in one palace, two branches of one tree, already leaning apart. Regional tellings linger on different moments here, but all agree on the shape of the thing: a lineage tangled at the root, its sweetest sacrifice and its deepest grievance bound together from the start.