The Weapon and the Curse

Ashwatthama brought the news to Duryodhana before he died — the camp destroyed, Dhrishtadyumna dead, Draupadi’s sons dead, the Pandava army ended in a night. Duryodhana, on the ground with his shattered thighs, heard that the avenging had been done and died, the story says, almost content, which is its own indictment of everyone: the war’s last satisfied man is a broken king hearing that children were killed in their sleep for his sake.

The Pandavas came back to the ash of their own camp and to Draupadi, who had kept her hair through the whole war for the binding it had been promised and now had her five sons murdered asleep on the very edge of victory. She asked for one thing, and the parva makes the asking precise: not comfort, not lament, but the head — or the surrender — of Ashwatthama, and she would not rise from her grief until she had it. Bhima went after him. Arjuna and Krishna followed, because Bhima alone against Ashwatthama cornered was not a thing that ended well.

They ran him down on the bank of the Ganga among sages. Cornered, with no army and no weapon to hand, Ashwatthama did the thing the war had been building toward since Arjuna won the Pashupata on the mountain: he invoked the Brahmastra, the highest weapon, the one that does not leave a world behind it — invoked it not at an army but at the earth, aiming it, when Krishna named the true target, at the womb of Uttaraa, Abhimanyu’s widow, to end the last unborn child of the Pandava line and finish the dynasty in its final seed. Arjuna, told to answer it, loosed his own Brahmastra against it, and the two ultimate weapons stood in the sky over the world facing each other, and the sages cried out that between them they would burn everything that was.

The parva’s moral is in what is asked of the two men then. The sages demanded both weapons be withdrawn. Arjuna, who had kept the discipline that came with the weapon, could call his back. Ashwatthama could not — he had the knowledge to launch it and not the mastery to recall it, the leash the great arms always come with finally proving the whole difference between the two archers. Unable to withdraw it, ordered not to destroy the world with it, he turned it, with malice and not by accident, onto the unborn child in Uttaraa’s womb, and the line of the Pandavas died there before it was born.

Krishna would not let even that stand as the last word. He cursed Ashwatthama to the punishment the epic reserves for the man who would not keep the leash: not death, which a warrior wants, but to wander the earth for an age, alone, foul-wounded and unhealing, bearing the weight of the children he had killed, deathless and unforgiven. And to Uttaraa he gave a counter-promise — that the dead child in her womb would be revived, would live, would carry the line. That child, brought back from the weapon’s death, was Parikshit, who would grow to be king after the Pandavas, and who would die, an age later, of the bite of a serpent, and whose son Janamejaya’s grief would light the very fire at which this whole story is being told. The story has just closed its own circle. The Sauptika Parva ends with the war over, the avenging done on every side, the line saved by a hand’s breadth, and nothing — the epic is brutally clear — nothing won.