The Two Who Remembered

Sanjaya had been talking since morning, and the man he was talking to could not see any of it.

It was the fifth day since Drona had taken the command of the Kaurava host, and by then the field had swallowed Bhishma and Abhimanyu and the king of the Sindhus. Dhritarashtra sat in his hall and listened, and Sanjaya, who had been given the sight to watch the whole of Kurukshetra at once, told him what his sons were doing on it.

"During that fearful carnage of men and steeds and elephants, O king," Sanjaya said, "Dushasana encountered Dhrishtadyumna."

Dhrishtadyumna was the son of Drupada, who had come out of a sacrificial fire for one purpose, the killing of Drona, and everybody on that field knew it, including Drona. He was mounted upon his golden car. He was exceedingly afflicted with the shafts of Dushasana, and the wrath came up in him through the affliction, and he showered his own shafts upon the horses of the man in front of him.

Covered with the arrows of Prishata's son, Dushasana's car, with its standard and its driver, soon became invisible.

That is the word Sanjaya used to a blind king. Invisible. There was a chariot somewhere inside that cloud, and a prince standing in it, and nobody watching from either army could have found either one. Afflicted with those showers of arrows, Dushasana became unable to stay before the illustrious prince of the Panchalas.

So the Panchala forced him, by means of his shafts, to turn back. And then did not follow him.

He scattered his arrows and went on, past the man he had beaten, in the direction of the one man he had been born to reach.

He proceeded against Drona.

At that moment Hridika's son, Kritavarma, appeared on the scene with three of his uterine brothers and attempted to oppose him.

Kritavarma was a Vrishni, of Krishna's own clan out of Dwaraka, and he had brought the Vrishni armies to Duryodhana while Krishna went unarmed to the other side. He came in across the Panchala's road with his brothers behind him, four car-warriors against one.

Then the twins came up. Nakula and Sahadeva, following in the wake of Dhrishtadyumna, who was proceeding like a blazing fire towards Drona, began to protect him.

Then all those great car-warriors, endued with might and excited with rage, began to strike one another, making death their goal. And here Sanjaya stopped the account of the fighting to say a thing about these seven men that he says of almost nobody else in the whole war.

Of pure souls and pure conduct, keeping heaven in view, they fought according to righteous methods, desirous of vanquishing one another. Of stainless lineage and stainless acts, those rulers of men fought fair battles with each other. There was nothing unfair in that fight, and no weapon was used that was regarded as unfair.

Then the list of what was not used, which is worth going through slowly, because every item on it is a thing that men elsewhere on that same field were using that afternoon.

No barbed arrows. None of those called nalikas. None that were poisoned. None with heads made of horns. None equipped with many pointed heads. None made of the bones of bulls or of elephants. None having two heads. None having rusty heads. None that were not straight going.

All of them used simple and fair weapons, and desired to win both fame and regions of great blessedness by fighting fairly. They were also, the entire time, trying to kill one another, and nothing in the epic finds that strange.

Checked by those two lions among men, the four heroes encountered the twins like the wind assailing a couple of mountains standing in its way. And Dhrishtadyumna, exceedingly quick in the use of weapons, saw that his road had been cleared for him, and took it.

Duryodhana saw the whole of it from where he stood.

He beheld the invincible prince of the Panchalas proceeding against Drona, and he beheld his own four heroes shut up with the twins, and there was nobody else near enough to be sent. So the king of the Kurus went himself, rushing to that spot, scattering showers of blood-drinking arrows.

Seeing this, Satyaki quickly approached the Kuru king.

Satyaki was the grandson of Shini, a bull of the Satwata race, a Vrishni out of Dwaraka and Arjuna's own pupil in arms, and he was the man the Pandavas sent when a thing had to be done and there was nobody left to do it. On this same field he had already cut a road for himself alone through the entire Kaurava army.

But long before Dwaraka and long before the war, he had been a boy in Hastinapura, in the same house and under the same preceptor as the prince who was now coming at him with his bow bent.

Those two tigers among men, the descendant of Kuru and the descendant of Madhu, approached each other, and became desirous of striking each other in battle.

And then neither of them shot.

Recalling to mind their behaviour towards each other in childhood, and reflecting with pleasure on the same, they gazed at each other and smiled repeatedly.

Sanjaya does not say how long it lasted. There was an army on either side of them and a preceptor being hunted a little way off, and in the middle of it two men held their bows half drawn and looked at one another across the space between two chariots, and smiled, and then smiled again.

Then king Duryodhana, blaming his own conduct in his mind, addressed his ever dear friend Satyaki.

"Fie on wrath, O friend," the king said, "and fie on vindictiveness. Fie on Kshatriya usage, and fie on might and prowess, since thou aimest thy weapons at me, and I too am aiming at thee, O bull of Sini's race."

Four things cursed in one breath, and the third of them is the code he had lived his entire life inside. A kshatriya fights. That is the whole of the usage, and it is the argument Duryodhana had used against every man who ever came to him asking for peace, including the one who had asked for five villages and been refused a needle's point of ground. Standing in front of Satyaki with his bow up, he spat on it.

"In those days thou wert dearer to me than life itself, and I also was such to thee."

He was not being polite. The two of them had been raised in the same courtyard, and in the epic's reckoning of who loved whom in that generation, this is a fact recorded and then never used again.

"Alas, all those acts of childhood that I remember, of both thyself and mine, became quite insignificant in the field of battle."

Not forgotten. He remembered them. He was reciting them to himself while he said this. What he says is that they had become insignificant, which is a different and worse thing, because it means he could still see them clearly and they had stopped weighing anything.

"Alas, moved by wrath and covetousness, we are here today for fighting against each other, O thou of the Satwata race."

Wrath and covetousness. He names the two causes correctly, in public, on the fifteenth day of a war that had already emptied his house of brothers, and he names his own share in them without argument. No man in the epic ever accused Duryodhana of not knowing what he was doing.

He simply never once stopped doing it. The bow stayed up while he spoke.

Unto him who said those words, Satyaki, conversant with high weapons, taking up some keen arrows, smilingly replied.

He was choosing his arrows while he answered. The text puts the two actions in the same sentence, and it is the whole of Satyaki's character in one line.

"This is no assembly, O prince, nor the abode of our preceptor, where in former days we sported together."

That is all he gives him. You are remembering a hall and a teacher's house. Look around you.

Duryodhana would not let it go.

"Where have those sports of our childhood gone, O bull of Sini's race, and, alas, how has this battle now come upon us? It seems that the influence of Time is irresistible. Urged though we are by desire of wealth, what use, however, have we of wealth, that, assembled together, we are now engaged in battle, moved by the avarice of wealth?"

He asks how the battle came upon them, as though it had come upon them like weather. Then he answers himself with Time, which is the answer that costs nobody anything. And then, at the very end, without seeming to notice that he is doing it, he asks the only question in the speech that has teeth in it. What use have we of wealth, when the wealth has brought us here?

He never waited for an answer to that one, and Satyaki did not give him one.

"This has always been the usage of the Kshatriyas," Satyaki said, "that they have to fight even against their preceptors. If I am dear to thee, O king, then slay me without any delay. Through thee, O bull of Bharata's race, I shall then enter the region of the righteous. Exhibit, without delay, all thy might and prowess. I do not desire to witness this great calamity of friends."

He had picked up the one thing Duryodhana had cursed, kshatriya usage, and set it back on its feet. Then he offered the king his own life as the shortest available way out of the conversation, and told him to hurry.

Having replied and reasoned thus, Satyaki, fearlessly and in utter disregard of life, quickly advanced against Duryodhana.

Beholding him advance, Dhritarashtra's son received him, and poured upon him of Sini's race a perfect shower of arrows.

Then commenced a terrible battle between those lions of Kuru's and Madhu's races, resembling an encounter between an elephant and a lion.

Duryodhana, filled with wrath, pierced the invincible Satyaki with many keen arrows shot from his bow drawn to its fullest stretch. Satyaki pierced the Kuru prince in return with fifty keen shafts, and once more with twenty, and again with ten. Then the king, smiling the while, pierced Satyaki in return with thirty arrows shot from his bowstring drawn to his ear, and then, shooting a razor-headed arrow, cut off in twain the bow of Satyaki with the arrow still fixed on it.

Endued with great lightness of hand, the Satwata took up a tougher bow and shot showers of shafts at him.

As those lines of arrows advanced for compassing the death of Duryodhana, the king cut them to pieces in the air, and the troops on his side shouted. It was, so far, the best hour Duryodhana had in the whole war. With great swiftness he afflicted Satyaki with seventy-three shafts equipped with wings of gold and steeped in oil, shot from a bow drawn to its fullest stretch.

All those arrows, and the bow that had sent them, and the arrow standing ready on it, Satyaki quickly cut off. Then he poured his own showers on his antagonist.

Deeply pierced by Satyaki and feeling great pain, Duryodhana, in great distress, sought shelter in another car.

He rested there awhile and refreshed himself, and then came out again and advanced against Satyaki, shooting at his car; and smilingly, said Sanjaya, Satyaki ceaselessly shot multitudes of shafts at his. The shafts of both mingled with one another in the welkin. Falling fast on every side, they made a sound like a raging fire consuming a mighty forest. With the thousands of arrows shot by the two of them the earth was densely covered, and the sky was filled as well.

Neither of them had said another word since the advance. Whatever they had been to each other in the preceptor's house, it had lasted exactly as long as the conversation.

Beholding that foremost of car-warriors, that hero of Madhu's race, to be mightier than Duryodhana, Karna rushed to that spot, desirous of rescuing the king.

Mighty Bhimasena, however, could not brook that attempt. He quickly proceeded against Karna, shooting innumerable shafts, and the two of them met the way they had already met eight times in that war.

Cutting off all those shafts of Bhima with the greatest ease, Karna cut off Bhima's bow, his arrows and his driver also, with his own shafts.

Then Pandu's son, filled with rage, took up a mace.

He crushed the bow of his antagonist with it, and the standard, and the driver, and then he broke one of the wheels of Karna's car.

Karna, however, stood on that car of his which had one of its wheels broken, immovable as Meru, the king of mountains. That beautiful car, which now had only a single wheel, was borne along by his steeds like the single-wheeled car of Surya drawn by the seven celestial horses.

Sanjaya gives the comparison without comment, and it is the most generous thing said about Karna anywhere in this section, and it is also the shape of his death. There is a wheel of Karna's that everyone in the audience is waiting for. It has not sunk into the earth yet. Here it is merely broken, and the horses keep the wreck moving, and the sun's son stands in the sun's chariot and goes on shooting.

Incapable of brooking the feats of Bhimasena, Karna continued to fight with him, using diverse kinds of shafts in profusion and diverse other weapons besides. And Bhimasena, also filled with wrath, continued to fight with the Suta's son.

Somewhere behind them Duryodhana had been let alone, and the duel that had begun with two men smiling at each other was over, and neither of them had killed the other, and nobody on that field remarked on it at all.

When the engagement had become general and confused, the son of Dharma looked at the Panchalas and the Matsyas standing at the edge of it, and spoke to them.

"They that are our life, they that are our heads, they amongst us that are endued with great strength, those bulls among men are all engaged with the Dhartarashtras. Why do ye then stand thus, as if stupefied and deprived of your senses? Proceed thither where those car-warriors of my army are fighting."

He gave them a reason next, and it is the plainest arithmetic Yudhishthira ever spoke aloud.

"Driving away your fears and keeping in view the duties of Kshatriyas, engage in fight, for then, conquering or slain, ye will gain desirable goals. If you prove victors, you may perform diverse sacrifices with profuse gifts to Brahmanas. If, on the other hand, you are slain, becoming then equals of the celestials, you will win many regions of blessedness."

Win and you can pay for the rites. Die and you have already been paid. That was the whole of the offer, and it is the same offer Satyaki had made to Duryodhana an hour earlier when he told him to kill him quickly, and it is what the men on both sides had been living on since the first morning.

Thus urged by the king, those heroic and mighty car-warriors engaged in battle, observant of Kshatriya duties, and quickly proceeded against Drona. The Panchalas assailed him from one side with innumerable arrows, while others headed by Bhimasena began to resist him from another.

Then Bhimasena and the twins addressed Dhananjaya loudly.

"Rush, O Arjuna, with speed, and drive away the Kurus from Drona's vicinity. If the preceptor can be deprived of his protectors, the Panchalas may then slay him easily."

Thus addressed, Partha suddenly rushed against the Kauravas, while Drona rushed against the Panchalas headed by Dhrishtadyumna.

And on that, the fifth day of Drona's command, said Sanjaya to the blind king, those heroic combatants were grounded and crushed with great celerity by the son of Bharadwaja.