Nakula

Madri's son

Pandu, cursed never to lie with a wife, had his sons through the mantra Kunti had been given. Kunti let Madri use it once, and Madri called the twin gods of healing, the Ashvins, and bore twins, Nakula and Sahadeva. When Pandu died, Madri followed him onto the pyre and left her sons to Kunti, who raised them as her own. Under Drona, Nakula became the family's finest swordsman.

The epic gives him few scenes of his own. He is usually named with his twin, and fourth among the brothers. What the text does give is specific.

The west, the dice and the lake

For Yudhishthira's Rajasuya, Nakula took the western road. In Madra, the kingdom of his uncle Shalya, Madri's brother, he won tribute through kinship rather than battle. In the dice hall he was the first brother Yudhishthira staked and lost.

In the forest, at a lake in Dvaitavana, Nakula climbed a tree to look for water and was the first to drink. He ignored a voice that told him to answer its questions first, and he fell dead. When the yaksha later offered Yudhishthira one brother back, Yudhishthira passed over Bhima and Arjuna and chose Nakula, so that Madri as well as Kunti would have a living son.

Granthika and the war

In the year of hiding he worked in King Virata's stables as Granthika, a keeper and trainer of horses. At Kurukshetra his great moment was a defeat. On the sixteenth day Karna broke his bow and chariot and left him empty-handed, then let him go, keeping his promise to Kunti that he would kill none of her sons but Arjuna. On the last day of the war Nakula killed Karna's son Chitrasena, climbing onto his chariot in view of both armies to do it.

The fall on the mountain

On the final journey Nakula fell after Draupadi and Sahadeva. His fault, Yudhishthira said, was that he believed no one was as handsome as himself.

Nakula matters less for what he did than for what was done around him. Two moments define him: a brother who chose him for fairness, and an enemy who spared him for a mother's sake. Both turn on the question of which mother's son he was. The epic leaves him as a man whose worth others had to notice, since he never insisted on it himself.