The Mahābhārata does not tell one story. It tells a thousand, nested one inside another like the aerial roots of a banyan, until you cannot say where the tree stops and the forest begins. A bard recites the epic to a gathering of sages; inside his telling, a sage recites it to a king; inside that, the characters tell one another tales — to teach, to warn, to console a grief. What follows is that tree: sixty-seven of its sub-stories arranged on the trunk of who tells what to whom, and bound to one another and to the great figures by curse, by boon, by the mirror held up to sorrow, and by the memory of former lives. Nineteen of the greatest are told here in full. Begin anywhere — and follow the threads.