The Lake and the Mace Duel

The Pandavas found him because he could not stay silent. They tracked Duryodhana to the lake and stood on its bank and called him out of the water — not with weapons but with words, Yudhishthira and Bhima taunting the hidden king for cowering at the bottom of a pond while his army lay unburied, until the goading did what an army could not and Duryodhana rose out of the lake to answer it. Even here the epic keeps its grammar: the thing that finally moves a man is never force; it is the insult he cannot let stand.

He came up and would fight, and Yudhishthira, in a gesture that is either magnanimity or the war’s last fatal piece of fairness, offered him terms no victor needed to offer: choose any one of us, choose your weapon, and if you win this single combat the whole kingdom is yours. The war of eighteen days reduced to one duel. Duryodhana chose the mace, his lifelong weapon, in which he had no equal — except Bhima, who had sworn in the hall to break the thigh he had slapped, and who stepped forward to keep the second half of the oath.

The mace duel between Bhima and Duryodhana is the war’s last great single fight, and it is even, because Duryodhana was genuinely the better mace-man and the parva refuses to pretend otherwise. They fought until the ground shook, and Duryodhana was winning on skill, and Bhima could not bring him down inside the rules — and the rules, by now, had been ash since Abhimanyu. Krishna, watching, struck his own thigh, a sign, and Bhima remembered the oath he had sworn in the hall and what part of Duryodhana it named. He swung below the waist, against the law of the mace, and shattered Duryodhana’s thighs, and the man who would not yield a needle’s point went down at last and could not rise.

It was a foul blow and the epic says so out of Balarama’s mouth — Krishna’s own brother, Duryodhana’s mace-teacher, who had sworn neutrality and now raged that the Pandavas had won the last duel by a cheat. And he was right, and the parva lets him be right, and lets Bhima be right too, because the oath was sworn in a hall where a queen was dragged by the hair while these same elders said nothing. The war ends exactly as it has been all along: two true things that will not reconcile, justice done by means that were not just, victory that no one can stand over cleanly.

Duryodhana, broken-thighed and dying on the field he had emptied, was given the parva’s last word and it is not a small one. He flung it up at the victors from the ground: that he had lived as a king, given freely to his friends, feared no enemy, and was dying on a warrior’s field with his honour and his heaven intact — while they would live having won by a lie about a teacher, a stratagem against a grandfather, a foul stroke against him, the night-killing of a boy. The flowers, the story says, fell from the sky on the dying man, not on the winners. The Mahabharata will not even let the defeated be simply wrong. It leaves Duryodhana alive a little longer on the ground, in the dark, so that he can send, into that night, the one order that will turn the Pandavas’ total victory to ash before the sun comes up.