The Day Bhima Asked for Peace

The Pandava camp at Upaplavya was thick with talk that summer, and none of it was quiet. Sanjaya had come and gone as Dhritarashtra's messenger, offering fine words and no land. Drupada's own priest had gone to Hastinapura and come back with less than fine words. Now the sons of Pandu sat in council with Krishna at their side, and the question that would not close was simple to ask and impossible to answer: how much of the kingdom, if any, would buy peace with Duryodhana.

Yudhishthira wanted five villages, no more and no less, as if choosing the smallest possible demand might shame his cousin into granting it. Arjuna wanted whatever his elder brother wanted, and said so. Draupadi, sitting where she was always permitted to sit though rarely asked to speak, kept her own counsel, though everyone in that tent remembered what thirteen years had not made her forget.

It was Bhima who broke the pattern, and that alone was enough to still the room. Of all the brothers, Bhima was the one whose grievance ran deepest and showed least patience. In the dicing hall he had sworn, before the assembled Kurus, that he would break Dushasana's chest with his own hands and drink the blood from the wound. No one in that tent doubted he meant it. So when Bhima rose to speak, the council expected him to demand blood twice over, to shout down any talk of five villages as five villages too many.

Instead he asked for peace.

'We are asking Duryodhana for scraps,' Bhima said, 'when we should be asking him to remember whose sons we are.' His voice was steady, which unsettled the room more than shouting would have. 'Bhishma raised us. Drona taught us to hold a bow. They are old men now, near the end of the years given to them, and they will stand in that field on the wrong side of a quarrel that is not theirs to die for. I do not want their deaths on my hands, however this ends.'

He turned to Yudhishthira. 'A cheap peace is still a peace. Take the five villages if that is what is offered, take less if that is all that comes, and let the rest go. I have carried worse than an empty hand before. I can carry it again.'

It was a strange thing to hear from the brother who had vowed to drink a man's blood, and everyone in the tent knew it. This was the same Bhima who had killed Bakasura with his bare hands to spare a village he had never met, who had broken Kichaka's bones for laying a hand on Draupadi, whose strength the Kauravas had feared since childhood, when they poisoned his food and threw him in a river to be rid of him. If war was inevitable, Bhima was the one man in the tent who was supposed to want it least in words and most in his fists.

Instead he sat down having asked his brothers to forgive an unforgivable insult a second time, for the sake of two old men who had never once stood up for the Pandavas in the hall where it mattered.

No one answered him at first. The silence went on long enough that it became its own kind of answer, and every eye in the tent turned, without anyone deciding to look there first, to Krishna.

Krishna did not argue with what Bhima had said. He did something harder to sit through: he agreed with pieces of it, slowly, and made the agreement sound like pity.

'You are right that Bhishma and Drona are old,' he said. 'You are right that peace, even a poor one, costs less than war. I wonder, though, whether it is really Bhima who is speaking, or whether you have simply borrowed Yudhishthira's patience and Vidura's caution and are reciting them back to us in your own voice. A man can carry another man's argument the way an ox carries a yoke, faithfully, without ever agreeing to wear it.'

He let that sit, then went further. 'I remember a Bhima who tore a rakshasa apart with his hands rather than let a village lose one more child to it. I remember a man who broke Kichaka's neck and did not flinch doing it. Where has that man gone? Has thirteen years of exile worn him down to this, an ox too tired to do anything but recite other men's caution and call it wisdom?'

It was not fair, and it was not meant to be fair. Krishna's eyes stayed on Bhima the whole time, watching for something under the surface of that stillness. 'Perhaps it is enough now,' he said, quieter, almost gentle, which somehow cut deeper than the mockery had. 'Perhaps the man who swore over Draupadi's hair to break Dushasana's chest has decided that oath was a young man's oath, not to be kept.'

Something moved in Bhima's face before it moved anywhere else. His jaw set. His hands, resting open on his knees a moment before, closed slowly into fists, and the sound of his own knuckles seemed to reach him from a distance, as if he were listening to someone else's body.

'Tired ox,' he said, and the words came out low, almost a laugh with no humor in it. 'You call me tired, Krishna, in front of my brothers and my wife, when it was I who dragged Duryodhana's guard off her in that hall, who could not save her, who has carried that failure every night since without one word of it to anyone.'

He stood. The tent, which had been still before, went stiller. 'I did not forget my oath. I have never once, not for a single night in thirteen years, stopped tasting Dushasana's blood before I sleep. I spoke of peace because Bhishma and Drona are old men who taught me what little gentleness I have, and I wanted, for one hour, to be a man who did not need to break anyone. You are right that it was not really me speaking. It was the last hour I will spend wanting that.'

His voice rose with each sentence until it filled the tent the way it had not since Kichaka's death. 'Ask Duryodhana for five villages if my brother wishes it. But if he refuses, I will break Dushasana's chest with these hands and drink from it as I swore, and I will crush Duryodhana's thigh under my foot for what he showed my wife, and no god or brother will talk me out of it a second time.'

Draupadi, watching him, said nothing, but something in her shoulders eased for the first time since the council had begun.

When the council had quieted, and the brothers had turned back to the smaller, harder question of villages and envoys, Krishna spoke to Bhima alone. 'I did not doubt your oath,' he said. 'I have never doubted it. But an army fights only as hard as its strongest arm believes the fight is worth fighting, and I needed to hear you say what you had just said, not assume it. A war carried by a general who has quietly made peace with losing is a war already half lost.'

Bhima looked at him for a long moment, some of the heat of a moment before still in his eyes, but with understanding come into them too. 'You provoked me on purpose.'

'On purpose,' Krishna agreed, without apology. 'You are the one brother the Kauravas have feared since you were a child too young to know why they poisoned your food. If word ever reached that camp that even Bhima had asked for peace and meant it, they would take it as proof the Pandavas' will was already broken, and they would demand more, not less. I needed the whole hall, and every spy Duryodhana keeps in it, to see the truth: that you would still choose war if peace failed. Now they have seen it.'

It was, Yudhishthira would say later, one of the smaller mercies of that whole bitter season, that even the epic's most implacable anger had reached, once, honestly, for another way. The peace mission Krishna himself would soon carry to Hastinapura grew out of that same wish, tried and exhausted before a single blow was struck at Kurukshetra. But the mission would fail, as everyone in that tent already half expected it would, and the anger Krishna had called back up in Bhima that day would still be waiting, entirely undiminished, on the day the two armies finally faced each other across the field.