The epic drawn as the tree it always was. The trunk is the frame of telling — a bard to the sages, a sage to a king. The branches are the eighteen books, and the canopy is the sixty-seven embedded tales, the nineteen greatest shown in gold. At the ground are the character-roots — Bhīṣma, Karṇa, Draupadī — and the aerial roots hanging between them are the bindings: the curse that cashes in, the boon that pays out, the mirror held up to grief, the former life explained. Touch any leaf to read it. This is the banyan: you cannot say where the tree ends and the forest begins.