The Rakshasa Who Came for a Debt

Night on Kurukshetra had always favored one side more than the other, though few among the human armies fully understood why. Rakshasas, the shape shifting beings who had thrown their strength behind Duryodhana from the war's first days, grew stronger as the sun went down and stronger still as true darkness settled in, until by the depths of the fourteenth night their power stood at its highest point of the whole eighteen days of war.

It was an hour that suited Ghatotkacha above all. Bhima's rakshasa son had spent the night tearing through the Kaurava ranks with a fury and a scale of illusion no ordinary warrior could answer, elephants scattered, chariots overturned, whole divisions broken and fleeing before something that seemed, in the dark, less like a single fighter than like the night itself turned against them. Duryodhana's generals had no answer for him. Even Drona's disciplined lines had begun to buckle, and Ashwatthama, fighting near his father, could do nothing to steady them.

It was into that panic, and into Duryodhana's own tent, that the giant Alayudha walked unannounced and unafraid, built on a scale that made the tent's tall poles look modest, and asked for nothing but permission to fight.

He had not come because anyone summoned him. He told Duryodhana plainly that he had been waiting years for a night exactly like this one, dark enough and desperate enough, to settle an old account with the family that had spent its whole existence killing rakshasas as though they were vermin: Bhima's family.

Duryodhana, watching his own night collapse around Ghatotkacha's rampage, heard Alayudha's grievance and felt something close to relief. Here, unlooked for, stood an answer of exactly the kind the hour demanded, a rakshasa of Ghatotkacha's own size and fury, arriving of his own will and asking only to be allowed to fight him.

"You are welcome here," Duryodhana said, "more welcome than you know."

The grievance Alayudha carried into that tent was old enough to have outlasted three generations of it. Long before this war, Bhima, wandering in exile with his mother and brothers, had killed the rakshasa Hidimba in a village forest to protect his sister Hidimbi, though he had spared Hidimbi herself and taken her as his wife. Years afterward, disguised as a Brahmin family in the town of Ekachakra, the Pandavas had lived under the shadow of another man-eating rakshasa named Bakasura, and Bhima had killed him too, freeing the town from the tribute of flesh it had paid him for a generation. Later still, in the forest called Kamyaka during the years of exile, a rakshasa named Kirmira, who called Baka and Hidimba his own kin, had challenged Bhima to avenge them and been killed in his turn.

Three names, three killings, all by the same hand, across years enough that most men would have called the account closed by time alone. Alayudha had not. He was bound to all three by blood, and he had watched, from wherever such beings watch, as Bhima's line grew stronger and more celebrated while his own kin's names faded into stories told to frighten children. He had waited, he told Duryodhana, not for an opportunity but for the right one: a night dark enough to give him his full strength, a war large enough to give him standing to enter it, and an enemy close enough at hand that killing him would look like service to a king rather than only an old grudge finally allowed to walk.

Tonight, at last, all three had arrived together. Duryodhana listened to all of it without impatience, already counting what such fury, aimed at Ghatotkacha, might be worth to him before the sun rose again.

When Alayudha strode out onto the field to meet Ghatotkacha, what followed was not, strictly speaking, a battle the human armies below could follow at all. Rakshasas fight as much with illusion as with claw and mace, and within moments of the two giants closing on each other, the sky itself above Kurukshetra seemed to change allegiance, host answering host, kin of Alayudha's summoned by his challenge and kin of Ghatotkacha's, on Bhima's side, rising to meet them.

Mountains that had not stood on that plain a moment before reared up and hurled themselves at each other and dissolved again into smoke. Rain fell that was not rain, dark and warm and unmistakably blood, drumming on shields and helmets below while soldiers who had fought all day without flinching found themselves flinching now at a sky gone the wrong color. Chariots without any driver a human eye could name went past overhead drawn by things with too many limbs or none at all, wheels turning on an axle of pure sound.

The human war continued beneath all of this, Kauravas and Pandavas still trading blows in the ordinary dark, but every soldier on that field who looked up, and most of them did, understood that something larger and older than their own quarrel was being settled directly above their heads. It was rakshasa against rakshasa, grudge against grudge, illusion against illusion, and for those brief violent minutes the human war felt almost secondary to it, a border skirmish taking place beneath a storm that had nothing to do with kings or kingdoms at all.

Bhima, fighting somewhere below in the ordinary dark, could not see his son directly through the maya overhead, only feel, in his own chest, that whatever was happening up there had everything to do with him.

Above the drifting mountains and the blood colored rain, the fight always came back, as such fights do, to the two who had started it. Alayudha bore down on Ghatotkacha with the accumulated weight of years, striking not merely to win a battle but to close, finally, an account three names deep, and for a time his size and his fury nearly matched what Ghatotkacha could answer.

But Ghatotkacha was not fighting only for himself. Somewhere below, in the ordinary dark, his father still stood in the thick of the human war, and Ghatotkacha fought that night the way he had fought every night of this war, with his back angled, whether or not it needed to be, toward wherever Bhima was. Alayudha's grievance was against Bhima's whole line, and Ghatotkacha understood, better perhaps than anyone else on that field, that if the giant broke past him tonight, it would not stop at a son.

That understanding put something into Ghatotkacha's arm that even Alayudha's years of waiting could not match. He took blow after blow that would have ended a lesser fighter and kept coming, until at last he closed the distance Alayudha had been trying all night to keep between them, took the giant's head in both massive hands, and tore it from his shoulders with a single wrenching motion that silenced, for a moment, even the illusion storm still rolling overhead.

The three names Alayudha had carried into the tent, Baka, Kirmira, Hidimba, went unanswered no longer, but not in the direction he had planned. It was Bhima's son, not Bhima himself, who had closed that account, and closed it, in the end, defending rather than avenging.

Ghatotkacha did not simply let Alayudha's body fall. He carried the huge severed head back across the battle line, through his own illusion storm still fading from the sky, and flung it down at the entrance of Duryodhana's tent, where it landed with a weight that ended, for those who saw it, any question of what had happened above the field that night.

Duryodhana had welcomed Alayudha hours before as the answer to Ghatotkacha, a debt three generations old arriving conveniently to serve a king's immediate need. He looked now at the proof that the debt had been collected in exactly the opposite direction, and said nothing that anyone recorded.

Karna, standing nearby, understood better than most what the sight meant. Ghatotkacha's maya had already cost the Kaurava army dearly that night, and now here was further proof, laid at Duryodhana's own feet, of what the boy could survive and answer. It was Karna who would end Ghatotkacha's night before dawn, with the one weapon he had sworn to keep for Arjuna, but that reckoning belonged to a different hour.

For now, what lay in the dust outside Duryodhana's tent was simply this: the oldest grudge on that field had not, in the end, been between kings at all, but between a rakshasa woman's grandsons and a rakshasa's own vengeance, carried across years and finally settled in one night by a half-blood boy guarding his father's back. Ghatotkacha would not survive the war that followed. But before he died for his father, in whatever hour still lay ahead of him that night, he had first made certain no one else would have to.