Itihāsa / Mahābhārata chronicle / Karṇa · 38 of 50
38. The wheel
Karṇa (कर्ण)
The wheel sinks. Karṇa is down on the ground, trying to lift it, and he asks for the pause the laws of war give a man whose chariot has failed. Those laws were recited on the eve. They have been broken already, on the boy in the circle, on the disarmed teacher. Karṇa asks for them now. Kṛṣṇa does not let Arjuna hear the request as a law. He recites the other list. Abhimanyu, surrounded. Draupadī, dragged. The insults of the hall. A man who asks for a rule he did not give to others is asking for a courtesy, Kṛṣṇa says, not for justice.
Arjuna kills him while he is down. Tellings, and readers, divide on whether that killing was adharma. The poem stages the division and does not hand down a verdict a lawyer could cite. It lets Kṛṣṇa's speech stand, and it lets the image stand, a great archer dead over a sunk wheel, and it lets the reader's discomfort stand. This page will not describe the shot. It will not acquit it.
Afterwards the brothers learn what Kuntī knew. The man they hated, the man who ordered the cloth, the man who would not change sides, was the eldest. Yudhiṣṭhira's grief is worse than his grief for a son, because it includes the knowledge that he has been fighting his own brother and preaching dharma while he did it. Kuntī has kept the secret until it can do nothing but wound. The promise Karṇa made her, that five sons would remain, has been kept by his death.
नेपालीमा
पाङ्ग्रा भासियो। कर्णले रथ बिग्रेको मान्छेलाई पर्खने युद्धको नियम मागे। ती नियम पूर्वसन्ध्यामा सुनाइएका थिए, र पहिले नै तोडिएका थिए। कृष्णले अर्को सूची सुनाउनुभयो: घेरिएका अभिमन्यु, तानिएकी द्रौपदी, सभाको अपमान। अरूलाई नदिएको नियम आफू माग्नु न्याय होइन, शिष्टाचार मात्र हो भन्नुभयो। अर्जुनले ढलेको मान्छेलाई मारे। त्यो अधर्म थियो कि होइन भन्नेमा पाठक बाँडिन्छन्। कविताले फैसला सुनाउँदैन। यो पृष्ठले प्रहार लेख्दैन, र दोषमुक्त पनि गर्दैन। पछि दाजुभाइले थाहा पाए। घृणा गरेको मान्छे जेठो भाइ थियो। कर्णको वचन, पाँच छोरा बाँकी रहने, उनकै मृत्युले पूरा भयो।