I fell asleep during the Mahabharat and dreamt that Duryodhana woke up in 2026. He went looking for someone who understood him. He did not have to look far.
One rule for this dream
Before the dream begins, a rule. Every line Duryodhana speaks here is mine. Every word Trump speaks here, he has actually said, on the record. I tried to invent better lines for him. I could not.
The palace of illusions
In my dream, Duryodhana woke up in a room so full of gold that for a moment he thought he was back in Hastinapur. It was Mar-a-Lago.
He walked in carefully. The last time he entered a dazzling palace, it was the Maya Sabha, the hall of illusions the Pandavas built at Indraprastha. He mistook a floor for a pool and a pool for a floor, fell into the water, and was laughed at. In the version every Indian grandmother tells, it was Draupadi who laughed. He never forgave it. Out of that one laugh came the dice game, the insult to Draupadi, thirteen years of exile and eighteen days of war.
At the end of the hall stood a man in a very long red tie.
“I alone can fix it,” said the man.
Duryodhana liked him at once. “They laughed at me in a palace once,” he said.
Here the journalist in me must add a footnote. In 2011, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Barack Obama made fun of Trump for several minutes while he sat in the audience. Many commentators have since traced his political career to that night. Trump has denied it. Duryodhana, I suspect, would not have believed the denial either. Some men forget a war. Nobody forgets a laugh.
The dice
“They say I cheated at dice,” Duryodhana grumbled. “My uncle Shakuni threw them. Is that my fault?”
The man in the red tie nodded. This was a subject he knew well. “The election was rigged.”
Duryodhana was impressed. In his day, you rigged the dice and then you won. This man had lost, said the dice were rigged, and then won the next game anyway. “Even Shakuni,” Duryodhana said, “never thought of that.”
Hastinapur and Sons
They moved on to family, as men of business always do.
Duryodhana ran Hastinapur the way every old family firm in Johari Bazaar is run: the blind father at the counter, a hundred sons in the godown, and the uncle in charge of strategy.
Trump’s firm is smaller, but far more international. His sons run the business and a crypto venture. And this September, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, flew to Moscow with the envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss peace with Vladimir Putin. Kushner’s investment firm, it should be said, has taken some two billion dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Duryodhana was moved. “Our ‘damaad’ (son-in-law) was Jayadratha,” he said. “We gave him one job, and he tried to kidnap the Pandavas’ wife. Yours negotiates wars? You are a lucky man.”
The silent elders
The two men had one more thing in common: a court full of wise old men who said nothing. When Draupadi was dragged into the Kaurava court, Bhishma, Drona and Kripa sat with their eyes lowered. In the popular telling, Bhishma later explained that he had pledged his loyalty to the throne. It is the saddest excuse in our epics, and the most modern.
This year, when allies were taxed for their friendships and a national theatre was held hostage for a nameplate, most of the world’s elders lowered their eyes too. One called him Daddy. The rest counted their trade surpluses. In 2026, the loyalty is simply priced in dollars.
Concepts of a plan
“How do you win your wars?” Duryodhana asked.
Here I must explain, because Trump answered with his campaign record. He had promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours”. The war has now outlived that promise by more than six hundred days.
“Kurukshetra took eighteen,” said Duryodhana, a little smugly.
Trump replied with the words he used in March 2025: “I was being a little bit sarcastic.”
“In Hastinapur,” said Duryodhana, “we called that diplomacy. And what is your plan now?”
“I have concepts of a plan.”
Duryodhana brightened. “So did I. I once built the Pandavas a house of lac. It had concepts of a fire.”
The most beautiful word
Then came the question every man asks another over whisky. What is your favourite word?
Trump did not hesitate. Tariff, he has said, is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.
Duryodhana’s favourite word was shorter. It was ‘no’. When Lord Krishna came to Hastinapur as a peace envoy and asked him to give the Pandavas just five villages, Duryodhana replied that he would not give them even as much land as the point of a needle could hold. Two men, two favourite words. One taxes everything. The other refused to share anything. Between them, they would have made a very efficient finance ministry.
The man of peace
“Then why,” asked Duryodhana, “do they call you a man of peace?”
Trump offered the line from the night he won in November 2024: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
In my dream, I leaned over and whispered a date to Duryodhana: 28 February 2026. The day America and Israel attacked Iran. He did not understand the calendar, but he understood the tone.
Then Trump, a little wounded, added what he posted in June 2025: “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize … no matter what I do.”
Duryodhana was sympathetic. Nobody gave him a peace prize either. But to be fair, he never asked for one before the war.
A flute at the door
Then, as always happens when men like these get too comfortable, there was the sound of a flute.
Krishna walked in, the same envoy who had once walked into the Kaurava court, and he made the same kind of offer. A small concession. A way out. No war. This time he was talking about Iran.
Duryodhana folded his arms and gave his needle answer again, from habit.
Trump gave the answer he gave the United Nations on 22 September: “I have a big decision to make: Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild … or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?”
Trump waved towards the buffet.
Krishna did not move. “I eat a man’s food only if he is dear to me, or if I am starving. Ask him.”
“Hastinapur,” Duryodhana muttered. “Chhappan bhog, fifty-six dishes. And he went off to eat saag at Vidura’s house.”
On the wall behind the buffet hung a framed photograph: a stadium in Houston, fifty thousand people, two men waving hand in hand. Beside it hung another, from Motera stadium in Ahmedabad, where more than a lakh had gathered. On the side table lay a glossy brochure: Trump Tower Mumbai. Trump Tower Pune. Gurugram. Kolkata. Three more cities had ‘coming soon’ stickers on them.
Duryodhana whistled. “That is a lot of hospitality. What did he get back?”
The door opened. A general in a Pakistani uniform walked in carrying a large gift-wrapped box with a golden bow. The tag said: ‘Nobel Peace Prize. Recommended.’ He placed it beside the buffet, filled his plate and left very happy.
Trump looked at the door, waiting for the next guest. Nobody came from Delhi.
Then the phone rang. It was Delhi. I could not hear the words, but I read the newspapers, so I could guess. Thank you for calling. We stopped the war ourselves. No, there will be no nomination.
Duryodhana was scandalised. “After the stadiums? After the towers? Ungrateful!”
“Some compliments cost nothing,” said Krishna. “That one would have cost Delhi fifty years of saying, ‘This is between us and Pakistan.’”
He looked at the untouched buffet. “Some banquets you walk past.”
Krishna smiled. It was the same smile he had smiled in Hastinapur, just before Duryodhana tried to have him arrested and Krishna revealed the whole universe inside himself. The court trembled. Duryodhana looked at the cosmos and saw only a magic trick.
Trump looked at Krishna and told him what he had told Axios in September: “Anything could happen with me.”
“That,” said Krishna gently, “is what Duryodhana thought too.”
The question I could not answer
Krishna left without another word, the way he had once walked out of the Kaurava court. Trump went off to discuss his ballroom. Then the gold room dissolved, the way rooms do in dreams, and I was back on my own sofa in Jaipur. Duryodhana was sitting beside me.
“If he had been me,” he asked, “what would he have done?”
I have watched Trump for ten years. I knew exactly what he would have done.
At the Maya Sabha, he too would have fallen into the pool. Then he would have called it the biggest splash in history and announced a swimming championship in his name.
When Krishna asked for five villages, he would have said yes, then put a 50 per cent tariff on all five.
When Krishna came as peace envoy, he would have called him a great guy, taken a photograph, and posted that the war was over before it had begun.
He would never have fought for eighteen days. He would have fought for twelve, announced a ceasefire on Truth Social, and named the war himself.
And he would never have hidden in a lake, as Duryodhana did on the last day of Kurukshetra. He would have stood up, fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Duryodhana thought about it. “So he would have lost too.”
“Yes,” I said. “But nobody would ever have been able to prove it.”
Duryodhan turned to the news from the Gulf: burning tankers, a blockade, a strait no wider than the road from Jaipur to Chomu.
“Tell me one thing,” he said. “In this war, which side are the Pandavas?”
I have been looking all year. I will tell you tomorrow what I found, and whether another Mahabharat is due.
To be continued
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