The Vow and the Death of Jayadratha

The whole next day was built around one man hiding behind an army and another man sworn to reach him before sundown or burn. Drona knew the vow as well as Arjuna did, and he built the day’s formation entirely to spend it: keep Jayadratha at the deep rear, ringed by the greatest warriors of the Kaurava side, and simply survive until the sun went down, and Arjuna would have to keep his word and kill himself, and the war would be over without another Pandava arrow that mattered.

Arjuna fought through it all day. He cut a road through the Kaurava army toward a man being moved and screened and kept always one wall of soldiers deeper, Krishna driving the white horses through gaps that closed behind them, the day burning down the whole time. The parva is a long held breath: every warrior of name stood in that road, and every one of them had to be gone through, and the light kept going.

It would not be enough by speed alone, and so the epic does the thing it does at its hinges — it bends the world a little, through Krishna, and then makes the bending cost something. As the sun neared the horizon with Jayadratha still alive and screened, Krishna covered it. Whether by the disc of his own power or by reading the hour exactly, the light failed early; a false dusk fell over the field. The Kaurava army roared — the day was won, the vow was forfeit, Arjuna was a dead man by his own word — and Jayadratha, who had spent the whole day hidden, came forward into the open to watch his enemy’s defeat and gloat at it. The sun came back. It had not set. And Jayadratha was standing in the open with the light on him and Arjuna with an arrow already drawn.

There was one more snare in it, because nothing in this story is free. Jayadratha’s father had laid a boon, or a curse, on his son’s death: whoever made Jayadratha’s head fall to the ground would have his own head burst apart that instant. Krishna told Arjuna how to thread it. He was to cut the head off with such force that it was carried, still flying, off the field entirely and dropped into the lap of Jayadratha’s father, who sat in penance some distance away — so that the head touched the ground in another man’s keeping. Arjuna loosed, and the head of the man who had closed the door on Abhimanyu was carried out of the battle and fell into the old king’s lap; and the old king, startled to his feet, let it roll to the earth himself, and his own head burst apart by his own boon. The killing of Jayadratha kept its every condition and still came out as vengeance, which is the parva’s grim signature.

The vow was kept and Abhimanyu was answered, but the rules were now ash and everyone knew it. The fighting did not stop at the true sundown that followed; it went on into the dark, the first night-battle, men killing men they could not see, torches and elephants and madness, Ghatotkacha — Bhima’s son by the rakshasi of the forest, who had promised in the Adi Parva to come when thought of — coming now in the night where his people fought best. The field had no daylight and no rules left at all, and into that darkness the war carried its next death, the one that would finally break the teacher himself.