The Last Commander

Shalya commanded for less than a day, and the brevity is the point. The great formations were gone; the great archers were gone — Bhishma on his arrows, Drona headless, Karna in the dust; the army that had darkened the horizon eighteen days ago was now a remnant being spent down to nothing. The Shalya Parva is the parva of an ending that has already happened and has not yet been admitted.

Shalya was a king and a great warrior, uncle of the Pandava twins, bound to the wrong side by Duryodhana’s old trick and his own honour, and he fought the morning well because he was the kind of man who would. But the Pandava army was now overwhelming, and the day had no design left in it, only attrition. Yudhishthira himself — the patient king, kept back from the killing through most of the war — was the one who killed Shalya, driving a spear through him near midday, the gentlest of the brothers given the last commander to end, as if the story were tidying its accounts before the final two men were left alone.

After Shalya the Kaurava army simply came apart. Shakuni, who had thrown the loaded dice in the hall and set the whole avalanche moving, was hunted down on the field and killed by Sahadeva, the youngest twin, who had sworn it in the dice hall and now collected the oath — the parva keeping the small promises along with the large ones. Duryodhana’s brothers, the hundred sons of the blind king, were by now nearly all dead, most of them at Bhima’s hands, the first half of Bhima’s hall-oath ground out to its conclusion across eighteen days. Duhshasana, who had dragged Draupadi by the hair and set his hands to her garment, had already fallen to Bhima in the manner Bhima had sworn in the hall — the breast torn open, the terrible vow about the blood kept to its horrifying letter, so that Draupadi’s hair could at last be bound.

By afternoon Duryodhana stood almost alone. The army he had refused to share a needle’s width of kingdom to avoid raising was gone into the ground around him; his brothers were corpses; Karna, the one man who had loved him without a price, was dead for his sake. Everything the Adi Parva had warned of, from the jackals at his birth onward, had arrived. He did not surrender, because the story had never built that into him. He left the field — the last commander of nothing — and went out alone across the emptied plain to a lake, and went down into its waters, and held them solid over himself by the last art he had, and lay hidden at the bottom of a lake while the war he had made looked for him.