bound but she is a bereaved mother and it means nothing to her:

Though you are gone I can see you yet like some splendour in a dream. O this brief life of ours is as fleeting as a bubble in water. Your young wife’s mate has been torn from her and she drowns in sorrow. How will I bear her up? O my son you have left too early. You have abandoned me in the summer of our lives and I am still so hungry to have you. (78.17–19)

From where Subhadra stands the exuberances of the battlefield with its rising and falling suns seem like so much star-death, a trail of ash, the mere testament of a violence that glows dimly under the morbid sign of glory. Here as elsewhere the “Maha·bharata” presents us with its skewed vision of life, a double perspective that renders inexplicable the real significance of the conflict between the Pandavas and Kauravas. In the epic, the greatest mystery is not, as it was in the Veda, the technology of the sacrifice, but the secret machinery of the human heart. As Sanjaya puts it, we cannot know if these men are fighting because they are “so devoted to the warrior’s calling” or simply “so besotted with death.” It is instructive to recall that beside all the Vedic analogies in the epic, the battle is also described in profane terms: as a ranga, a crimson playhouse, a painted stage where the actors remain masked to one another and even to themselves. Here they must play out their destinies whether or not their gestures and words are their own, left to puzzle over success and failure with neither divine guidance nor supernatural explanation to help them understand. Not unlike ourselves.