The Wandering Horse and the Son Who Did Not Know

The horse wandered, in its year, into Manipura, and there the parva sets its hardest small story — small because it is one combat among many, hard because it is the whole epic’s wound in miniature.

Years before, on his long exile in the Adi Parva, Arjuna had married Chitrangada, princess of Manipura, and gone on, as men in this story go on, leaving a son he barely knew: Babhruvahana, raised by his mother and his grandfather to be a king of that land. When the sacrificial horse entered his country and Arjuna’s army followed it, Babhruvahana came out to receive his father — not with war but with the honour a son owes — and Arjuna, in the role the rite forced on him, refused the welcome and demanded the fight the Ashvamedha required, rebuking the boy for greeting an invading army with courtesy instead of arms. The father insulted the son for being peaceable. The epic has done this exact thing to itself from the first chapter, and here it does it one last time, deliberately, to the man who carried the Gita.

So the son fought the father, and the son won. Babhruvahana, fighting well and without hatred, struck Arjuna down on the field, and the greatest archer in the story died there, in a minor combat, in his own son’s country, killed by a boy keeping the duty his father had shamed him into. The parva lets that stand for a moment in its full horror — Arjuna dead, not at Kurukshetra against Karna or Bhishma, but here, of a quarrel a rite required and a pride that had learned nothing.

Then it gives back what it took, and the giving-back is the point. The grief brought the women out, as grief in this epic always does. Ulupi, the serpent princess who was also Arjuna’s wife from the same old wandering exile, came with a gem of her people that restored life, and revived him — and revealed that the death had been arranged, by her, as a deliberate expiation: Arjuna had killed Bhishma from behind Shikhandi, against the warrior’s code, and had been owed a death for it, and this contrived, survivable death by his own son had been the price paid and refunded, the account from the Bhishma Parva quietly closed at last. The epic balances its books even here, even in a side-country, even years late.

Arjuna lived; the son was embraced; Chitrangada and Ulupi and the line of Manipura were folded into the returning company; and the horse, its year nearly run, turned back toward Hastinapura with the kingdom re-knit behind it. The sacrifice was performed. The sovereignty was confirmed and the rite promised its absolution. But the parva has just shown, through one father and one son, what the absolution is worth: the war’s habits outlive the war, the old prides reach even into the rite meant to cleanse them, and the only thing that ever truly restores anything in this story is not a sacrifice but a return — someone coming back, with the means to mend, for a death that pride caused. The Pandavas had their empire, confirmed and cleansed. The story now begins, quietly, to take everything away.