The Death of Kichaka

Kichaka was the commander of Virata’s army and the brother of Virata’s queen, and the real power in Matsya — the king feared him, and so the court did. He saw Sairandhri, the new servingwoman with the bearing that her plain work could not hide, and wanted her, and being the kind of man who had never been refused anything, did not understand the word when she used it.

Draupadi did what she had always done: she named her circumstance, claimed the protection of unseen powerful husbands — gandharvas, she said, who would kill any man who touched her — and held her dignity in front of a man who had none. Kichaka did not believe in husbands he could not see. He went to his sister the queen, who arranged, against Draupadi’s will, for the servingwoman to be sent to his quarters on a pretext; and when Draupadi came and again refused him, he assaulted her and, when she fled into the king’s own hall, pursued her there and struck her down in front of Virata and the assembled court.

And the court did nothing — and the parva is built around that nothing, because it is the dice hall again, exactly. Yudhishthira was there, in his courtier’s disguise, and could not rise without unmaking the year; he could only say, through his teeth, a courtier’s mild useless words about forbearance, and watch. Draupadi looked at him as she had once looked at him across that other hall, and saw the same paralysis dressed in a different costume, and understood that her protection, this year, would not come through the front of the hall. She went, that night, to the kitchen.

She found Bhima and told him plainly: this is the second hall, and you are again being asked to sit in it, and I will not survive a year of it. Bhima, who had carried his oath and his idleness through twelve forest years and one kitchen, did not argue. They made a plan with the precision of people who have waited a long time for permission. Draupadi sent word to Kichaka, feigning consent, naming a place and an hour — the deserted dancing-hall, by night. Kichaka came to keep an appointment with a woman and found, in the dark, the cook. Bhima killed him with his hands and left the body so broken that those who found it could not at first tell it was a body, and let the court conclude that the unseen gandharva husbands had, after all, been real.

It was justice, and it was a breach in the disguise, and the epic, as always, knows it is both. Kichaka’s kinsmen, enraged and afraid, seized Draupadi to burn her on his pyre, and Bhima had to come a second time, in the dark, and break them too — too much strength shown in one night for a court to keep explaining as luck. The thirteenth year had nearly run its full term, but it had now spent its silence. The death of Kichaka removed the one man strong enough to defend Matsya — and the news of a kingdom suddenly without its commander travelled, as such news does, straight to the ears of the cousins who had been hunting these very people for thirteen years.