Duryodhana

On the eighteenth and last day, Shalya took command and fought with great valour, until Yudhishthira, roused to an uncharacteristic blazing wrath, hurled a divine spear that pierced his chest and laid him dead. And Sahadeva hunted down and beheaded Shakuni, the crippled schemer who had been the architect of the whole ruin, whose loaded dice had begun it all; and Bhīma systematically crushed the last of the sons of Dhritarāshtra, fulfilling his vows one by one.

And at the end of that day Duryodhana stood entirely alone, his eleven divisions reduced to dust, his brothers and his champions all dead, wounded and burning, with nothing left.

He walked to a lake in the heart of Kurukshetra, and by his magic entered the waters and sat at the bottom in a trance, cooling his feverish body, hiding. And the Pāṇḍavas, guided by Krishna, tracked him to the pool; and Yudhishthira taunted him, asking whether a proud warrior-prince would hide in a pond like a common fugitive. And Duryodhana, stung, rose from the waters, mace in hand, and offered to fight them all, though he asked, with a strange late flash of fairness, to face them one at a time.

He chose to fight Bhīma, mace against mace, for the two of them were the great mace-fighters of the age, both pupils of Balarāma; and Balarāma himself returned from his pilgrimage to watch. And Duryodhana's body, hardened by the protective glance of his blindfolded mother Gāndhārī, who had unbound her eyes for one moment to pour her whole penance-gathered power upon her son, was proof against Bhīma's blows, and he began to overpower the wearied Bhīma.

And Krishna, watching the crisis, tapped his own thigh, a silent sign; and Bhīma understood, for he had sworn, on the day Draupadī was shamed, to break the thigh that Duryodhana had bared and slapped in insult before her. And with a swift stroke Bhīma bypassed Duryodhana's guard and shattered his thighs, and the mightiest of the Kauravas crashed to the earth, his thighs broken, screaming in agony, and lay there dying.

Now the breaking of the thighs was against the law of mace-combat, which forbade a blow below the navel, and Balarāma raged at the foul stroke and raised his weapon to destroy Bhīma, until Krishna restrained him, explaining the necessity of it and the fulfilment of Bhīma's ancient vow. And Balarāma, disgusted by the unclean victory, departed.

And here the story asks us to sit with a genuine difficulty, and does not resolve it cleanly: that the Pāṇḍava victory, righteous in its cause, was won at the last by a foul blow, a broken rule, a stroke that honour forbade; and that this shadow lay over even the triumph of the just.

The war had begun with Duryodhana's crimes; it ended with a broken law on the Pāṇḍava side; and the story lets us feel that in such a war, fought to its bitter end, no one comes away wholly clean, and that the victory of dharma over so great an evil was itself purchased, at the last, with a wound to dharma.