The Wheel and the End of Karna

They met at last, the two greatest archers the story had, on one strip of churned ground with the armies fallen back to watch — Arjuna with Krishna at the reins, Karna with the resentful Shalya at his, the secret of their brotherhood sealed and unspoken.

The duel was even, and the parva wants it even, because Karna’s tragedy is that he was Arjuna’s equal and lost anyway, brought down not by a better man but by the long arithmetic of every curse and every gift the Adi Parva had loaded onto him. They fought weapon against weapon with the field unable to follow it. And then the loaded debts came due one after another, in order, the way the story had filed them.

The curses came first. Karna reached for the Brahmastra, the highest weapon, and the words to recall it went out of his mind — exactly as his teacher Parashurama had cursed they would, in the hour he needed them most, the price of a lie told in his youth to be taught at all. Then the earth itself kept its account: the ground had once been cursed by a brahmin whose cow Karna had killed by accident, that it would seize his wheel in his worst moment, and now in the middle of the duel the left wheel of Karna’s chariot sank into the soft earth and held, and the chariot would not move. Karna leapt down to free the wheel with his hands, and called across to Arjuna for the pause the rules of war required — do not strike a man disarmed and off his chariot; you are the keeper of dharma; wait.

And here the epic does the cruelest and most honest thing in the whole war. Krishna answered for Arjuna, and he answered with a list — where was this dharma, he asked Karna, when a boy was surrounded and cut down inside the Chakravyuha; where was it when the dice were loaded; where was it when a queen was dragged by the hair into a hall and you, Karna, sitting among them, called her a thing to be owned; where was the rule then, that you invoke it now, with your wheel in the mud. There is no clean answer to it, and the parva does not supply one. The men who broke the rules first cannot claim them last; and the men keeping dharma have, by now, broken it themselves to win, and know it. Both things are true at once, and the story makes the reader hold them both. Krishna told Arjuna to shoot. Arjuna shot. The arrow took Karna’s head while he stood on the ground with his hands on his own chariot wheel, asking for the rule.

He died not knowing his brothers had been his brothers — or knowing, by then, and never having said it. Kunti’s silence and Karna’s silence and Krishna’s silence had held to the end, exactly as long as they had been sworn to. When the war was over and the secret came out, Yudhishthira would learn that the man he had been taught to hate was the eldest of them all, that he had cursed and warred against his own brother, and the grief of it would nearly cost the epic its peace. But that was later. On the seventeenth day there was only a head in the dust, a friend’s irreplaceable archer gone, and Duryodhana, who had crowned a charioteer’s son in an arena a lifetime ago and been loved for it ever since, weeping over the one man who had loved him back without conditions. The Kaurava army had almost nothing left. They gave the command, for the little that remained of it, to Shalya — and the war turned toward its last day.