The Three Survivors and the Night Slaughter

Three men were left alive on the Kaurava side at the end of that last day: Ashwatthama, son of Drona; Kripa, the first teacher; and Kritavarma, a Yadava lord. They found Duryodhana on the ground in the dark, his thighs shattered, dying and not yet dead, and Ashwatthama, who had loved his father and watched him beheaded unarmed and meditating on a battlefield by a lie told in Yudhishthira’s mouth, swore to the broken king that he would not let the night pass without an answer. Duryodhana, with the last authority he had, named him commander of an army of three and blessed the oath. It is the parva’s whole engine: a vow made over a dying man, in the dark, by a man with nothing left to lose and a father to avenge.

The three came through the forest to the edge of the sleeping Pandava camp, and Ashwatthama’s nerve, for a moment, was honest with itself — to fall on sleeping men was outside every law of war that the first chapters had so carefully recited. Then he saw, in the dark, an owl come silently into a tree of sleeping crows and kill them one by one where they roosted, and he took it as the night’s instruction and his conscience went quiet. The Sauptika Parva is named for exactly this — sauptika, the killing of the sleeping — and the epic gives it its own book because it wants the act isolated, unmissable, the floor of the war’s morality finally reached and then gone through.

He could not enter the camp alone past its guardian, and so he did the thing the parva treats as the true crossing-over: at the gate stood a being of terrible power barring his way, and Ashwatthama, unable to defeat it, offered himself and his act in worship to Shiva, the destroyer, and was permitted through — the night-slaughter consecrated, made a sacrifice, the killing handed to the god of endings to carry. He went into the camp with Kripa and Kritavarma holding the gate so none could flee, and he went through the tents in the dark killing men where they slept.

He killed Dhrishtadyumna, who had beheaded his father, killing him with his hands and feet as a deliberate denial of a warrior’s clean death. He killed the sons of Draupadi — five young men, the Upapandavas, asleep, mistaken in the dark or not caring by then for whom — and Shikhandi, and Drupada’s line, and the camp’s whole sleeping host, while the two at the gate cut down any who ran and then fired the tents. By the time the sky greyed there was almost no one of the Pandava army left alive; the war had been won at sundown and lost again by dawn, every victory of eighteen days undone in one night by three men, because Duryodhana had been left alive long enough on the ground to give one order. The five Pandavas and Krishna survived only because they had not been in the camp that night. They had won everything. They woke to find they had nothing.