After he had died, custom required that his nearest kinsman should raise issue for him, so,--owing to Bhishma's vow,--Vyasa, who was fabulously ugly, undertook to visit the two widows.

One of them, catching a glimpse of him, bore him a blind son (Dhritarashtra), while the other was so frightened that she bore a son of such pale complexion that he was known as Pandu, the White.
Neither of these youths being deemed perfect enough to represent properly the royal race, Vyasa announced he would pay the widows another visit, but this time they hired a slave to take their place, so it was she who brought into the world Vidura, God of Justice.
Because one prince was blind and the other the offspring of a slave, the third was set upon his throne by his uncle Bhishma, who in due time provided him with two lovely wives.
With these the monarch withdrew to the Himalayas to spend his honeymoon, and while there proved unfortunate enough to wound a couple of deer who were hermits in disguise.

In dying they predicted he would perish in the arms of one of his wives, whereupon Pandu decided to refrain from all intercourse with them, graciously allowing them instead to bear him five sons by five different gods.

These youth, known in the poem as the sons of Pandu, the Pandavs (or the Pandavas), are the main heroes of India.

As a prediction made by an ascetic was bound to come true, the king, momentarily forgetting the baleful curse, died in the embrace of his second wife, who, in token of grief, was burned with his remains, this being the earliest mention of a suttee.
Meantime the blind prince had married a lady to whom a famous ascetic had promised she should be mother to one hundred sons! All these came into the world at one birth, in the shape of a lump of flesh, which the ascetic divided into one hundred and one pieces, each of which was enclosed in a pot of rarefied butter, where these germs gradually developed into one hundred sons and one daughter.
As long as Pandu sojourned in the Himalayas, the blind prince reigned in his stead, but when he died, his surviving widow brought to the capital (Hastinapur) her five divine sons, the Pandavs.