At the end of everything the five brothers gave the kingdom away and started walking north, on foot, to die. Draupadī went with them. So did a dog, which nobody had invited and nobody sent away.
They fell one at a time on that road. Draupadī first. Then the youngest, then the next, then Arjuna, then Bhīma.
Yudhiṣṭhira did not stop and did not look back. When somebody still walking asked him why the one behind had fallen, he gave an answer, and kept going.
In the end there was a man and a dog, and a mountain, and nothing else.
Then Indra came down with a chariot. Get in — you are the only person ever to be offered this in your own body, without dying first.
Yudhiṣṭhira said: the dog comes.
Indra said there was no place in svarga for a dog. He was not being cruel. It was simply the rule, and he said so several times, patiently, the way you explain something obvious.
And Yudhiṣṭhira — who had lost a war's worth of people, and his wife, and all four brothers on that same road, and had not turned round for any of them — got out of the chariot.
He said the dog had come to him for shelter and he was not going to leave it standing on a mountain to buy himself something. Not heaven. Not anything.
The dog was his father. It had been the whole time, and it had been the last test, and it was the only one that had ever actually been about him.
His father told him so where he stood: that he had been watched the whole way, and that nobody else had ever turned that down.
Everything he had was gone by then, and the one thing left was a hungry dog with nobody. He chose the dog over heaven, and that turned out to be the only question he was ever really asked.