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The tenth day of the battle of Kurukshetra. Darkness has long since fallen. On the battlefield, there are two warriors still, next to each other. One is a Pandav, the first one; the other is a Kaurav, the last one. They are silent, each fighting himself, both painfully aware it is a losing battle.

“Stop this war,” Bheeshma puts all his might into the words. They come out as a croak. He is as comfortable as a man impaled on a hundred arrows can expect to be. But every now and then, a pain much more discomforting sears through him and makes the arrows seem like bliss.

Karna looks away, seeming to concentrate upon something lying within the darkness just beyond the circle that his mashaal renders bright as the day. He can’t see. Even after surreptitiously wiping his eyes clean of tears, he finds the darkness unyielding. Frustration claws at him from within.

He knows though, that there are corpses there. Men who were fighters in the morning and who nursed futile hopes of surviving beyond sunset. He himself might have felled many of them, great and mighty archer that he is.

“I cannot,” he says and forms the next sentence in his head before saying it. “I do not take pleasure in ploughing through my countrymen every morning; it is not like I have a choice. I do what I do for the sake of what I promised Duryodhana. This is his war I fight.”

Bheeshma shifted, the arrows creaking under him, and willed Karna to look at him. The tug of it forced Karna to turn to face him. Kneeling down next to his dying grandfather he forgot to hold the tears back – they fell free.

“Go to Yudhishthira. Tell him you are a son of Kunti. He will never fight you. Nor will Duryodhana, once he learns of this.”

“I will be beating the purpose of this war if I do that,” said Karna stoically.

“You are indeed wiser than any other my son,” said Bheeshma, “…if you know the purpose of this war. Because I don’t. All I see is the fates conspiring against us, systematically going about splitting families, turning brother against brother, sowing seeds of hate.”

“Kaliyug,” said Karna.

“Not yet O wise one,” Bheeshma’s face managed something resembling a sneer but he couldn’t afford the body language sarcasm called for. “Why are you afraid to own up to what you choose? You choose to fight.”

“I do,” said Karna, “But I don’t want to fight.”

Karna bent over his grandfather. Bheeshma kissed his grandson for the first time in his life. Karna got up. He grew weary of fighting. Even his tears seemed to shout joyful war cries as they leapt out of his eyes and on to Bheeshma’s prone form as he got up.

“If I am lucky, I will die before you do,” he said, turned and walked away.

Karna died on the seventeenth day of the battle, while Bheeshma still breathed.

Heavily inspired from an episode in Ramesh Menon’s Mahabharat retelling.

Posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 3:47 am and filed under stories, mahabharat.

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