After the partition of the Kuru kingdom, the five Pandavas raised at Indraprastha a court of such splendour — the magical assembly hall built by the divine architect Maya — that it became a wonder of the age. Yudhishthira, the eldest, performed the great Rajasuya sacrifice and was acknowledged as a paramount sovereign. It was the height of their fortune, and in the epic's moral grammar, the moment before the fall.

The cousin who could not endure it was Duryodhana. Visiting the marvellous hall, he stumbled into a pool he mistook for solid floor and tripped where he thought there was water; the mockery he imagined burning in the watchers' eyes festered into hatred. He could not defeat the Pandavas in arms. But his maternal uncle, Shakuni of Gandhara, knew another road. He had divined the one flaw in Yudhishthira's otherwise unbending character: a king's sense of honour that forbade him to decline a formal challenge, and a fatal fondness for the dice. And Shakuni, the tradition insists, played with dice that obeyed him — by sleight, or by a darker enchantment said to come from his father's very bones.

The invitation went out in Dhritarashtra's name; to refuse the old king's summons would itself breach decorum, and so Yudhishthira came to Hastinapura and sat down to play. What followed is one of the epic's most agonising passages. He staked his wealth, his pearls and gold, and lost. He staked his cattle, his armies, his lands, and lost. He staked the kingdom itself, and lost. Caught in the gambler's delusion that the next throw must turn — anṛta, the spell of the dice that the epic treats almost as a moral intoxication — he could not rise from the board. At last, having nothing left, he staked his brothers one by one, then himself, and lost them all.

The Mahabharata does not excuse Yudhishthira. It is searching about how a man devoted to dharma can be undone — not by malice in himself, but by a single ungoverned appetite exploited by those who study him. The dice game is the hinge of the whole epic: not the war's first blow, but the moment from which the war became, in retrospect, almost unavoidable. And the worst was not yet done, for there remained one stake the brothers held in common, and Duryodhana would demand that it be wagered too.