The Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata (300 BCE–300 CE) paints an irresistibly complex, dark narrative landscape. Its central story of fratricidal war and pyrrhic victory exerts a gravitational pull on South Asian literature and religion. Retellings of the Mahābhārata fill South Asia’s languages, artistic genres, and religious communities, and each telling answers the violent, disorienting world of the Sanskrit epic in its own way. In this rich and crowded field, one work stands out for its highly unusual reconstruction of the epic story: Pañcarātra (The Five Nights, ca. 800 CE), an anonymous Sanskrit play with a long if opaque performance history in Kerala. At the conclusion of the drama, the epic’s famously antagonistic cousins agree to share rulership of their kingdom, thereby averting the great war that is the hallmark of the Mahābhārata. The Pañcarātra transforms the epic on a monumental, outrageous scale. How ought we to make sense of a Mahābhārata where the war never happens? The Pañcarātra’s approach is radical, but it represents a deeply perceptive interpretation of the Mahābhārata itself. This becomes clear when we consider how thoughtfully the Pañcarātra’s vision is filtered through the Virāṭaparvan (The Book of Virāṭa’s Court). This is the fourth book of the Mahābhārata and its self-designed concave mirror. While the Virāṭaparvan is part of the Mahābhārata, it also stands apart from it. It encapsulates the epic’s plot and reflects the whole epic back on itself—as if it were a play within a play. But it works obliquely. Throughout the Virāṭaparvan the signature horrors of the greater epic are reimagined and turned upside-down. It is the only place in the Mahābhārata where everything appears to go according to plan for the protagonists; therefore it is the only place in the epic where we discover periods of resolution, satisfaction, and comic relief. Growing out of the Virāṭaparvan, the Pañcarātra takes its upward turns at an even steeper angle. Fantasy offers us one way of understanding the Virāṭaparvan’s relationship with the broader epic around it—and by extension the Pañcarātra’s. Both texts present fully developed alternative visions of the Mahābhārata that self-consciously embody extraordinary possibilities as opposed to realities. Through a technique I call “veiled narration,” these works depict the epic stereoscopically. On one level, we follow the action toward a compelling sense of integration. This is the veil, ever so elegantly woven. But the Pañcarātra and the Virāṭaparvan pull back this veil at key moments, reminding us of the tragedies they have forestalled. Resolutions, then, are temporary—deceptive, even—part of the performances that both texts stage, one literal and one metaphorical. Yet a happy ending, even in irony, conveys its own constructive truth—an auspiciousness yet more striking because of the tragic raw material from which it is forged. This may be the power of fantasy. It propels the Virāṭaparvan into a uniquely auspicious position in the world of the Mahābhārata and therefore into countless tellings. Of these, the Pañcarātra remains the most inventive—and perhaps the most insightful.