Ghatotkacha: The Night His Death Saved Arjuna
On the fourteenth night of the war the fighting refused to stop at sunset, and in the dark Ghatotkacha, the rakshasa son of Bhima, began to eat the Kaurava army alive. To save it Karna hurled the one weapon that could not miss, the spear he had kept for years for Arjuna alone. Krishna watched Bhima's son fall and shouted for joy, and this story will not soften that joy, because the whole of the war's terrible arithmetic is in it.
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In this story
The Son Who Came When Called
Before there was a war there was a forest. When the Pandavas escaped the burning house at Varanavata they walked into wild country, and the wild country was home to rakshasas. One of them, Hidimbi, was sent by her brother to kill the sleeping brothers. She saw Bhima sitting guard and loved him on sight instead. Bhima killed the brother, and at Kunti's word he married the sister, and stayed with her until a son was born.
The boy came into the world with a head smooth and round as a pot, a ghata, so they called him Ghatotkacha. Rakshasa children do not wait on the years. Within the hour he was standing, within the day he was a young warrior, and when the Pandavas took the road again he touched his father's feet and said the sentence his whole life would keep: think of me, and I will come. Then the forest closed around him and his mother, and Hastinapura forgot he existed.
He did not forget. Years later, in the exile, when the climb into the high Himalaya broke Draupadi's strength, Bhima thought of his son. Ghatotkacha came with his people and carried her over the passes as if she weighed nothing, set the family down at Badari, bowed, and went home. No one offered him a kingdom. When the sons of the house were counted, he was never counted. He was the firstborn son of the Pandava line and he inherited nothing, a rakshasa in a family of kings, and he came every single time he was called. When the great war gathered its armies, he arrived unasked, with his own.
The Day That Would Not End
On the fourteenth day of the war Arjuna had a vow to keep, sworn the evening before over the body of his own son: Jayadratha dead before sunset, or Arjuna himself would walk into the fire. He kept it with the sun's last light.
And then something in both armies snapped. Since the first day the rule had held: conches at dusk, and the killing stops until morning. It was one of the terms both sides had agreed to before the first arrow flew. That evening nobody sounded the retreat. Fury carried the Kauravas forward, and the fighting rolled on into a blackness where a man could not tell his brother from his enemy at a spear's length. Then the torches came out, thousands of lamps bound to chariots and to the backs of elephants, and the field burned like some terrible festival. The war had broken its own word, and the night now belonged to whoever knew how to use it.
Darkness Belongs to the Rakshasas
A rakshasa's strength rises as the night deepens and crests at midnight. Krishna knew it, and it was Krishna who said that this hour had an owner: send Ghatotkacha against Karna. Mark that now. It will matter in a little while.
Ghatotkacha went into the Kaurava army like weather. He rose off the ground, he was in three places, he was nowhere, his maya multiplied him across the dark, and out of that dark came rocks and iron and fire and whole uprooted trees. Alambusha, the rakshasa who fought on the Kaurava side, came out to meet him, and Ghatotkacha killed him. Divisions that had held their ground for fourteen days came apart. Soldiers threw down their torches to run, and one cry travelled the whole length of the lines: this creature will finish us all before moonrise. Duryodhana turned to Karna, and so did every man near enough to shout. The spear. Use the spear. Or by morning there is no army.
One Throw, Kept for Another Man
Understand what they were asking for. Karna had been born with golden armour grown into his skin and rings grown into his ears, and while he wore them no weapon could kill him. Indra, king of the gods, and, the epic never lets you forget it, Arjuna's own father, had come to him disguised as a brahmin beggar and asked for that armour and those earrings, to strip him bare before the duel everyone knew was coming. Karna, who refused no one at his hour of prayer, cut them out of his own flesh and handed them over, bleeding. And Indra, shamed by the size of the gift, gave something in exchange: the Shakti. Throw it once, and the one it is thrown at dies, whoever that is. Then it returns to Indra's hand forever. One certain death, sealed inside a spear.
Karna had written one name on that single throw, and the name was Arjuna. Krishna knew it, and had spent the whole war steering Arjuna out of Karna's reach in any hour when the spear might fly. Every night of the war Karna went back to his tent with the throw still unspent, still waiting for the only enemy he wanted it for.
Now his army was being eaten around him in the dark, men were screaming his name, and the enemy in front of him was not Arjuna. The tellers say he knew exactly what he was giving up, and gave it up. He threw.
The Fall
The Shakti went through the night like a piece of the sun torn loose. Ghatotkacha's illusions burst around it, and it went through his chest. And the dying son of Bhima had one act left in him. He swelled, vast as a thundercloud, vast as a hill, chose the place of his own fall, and came down on the Kaurava lines, and a whole division died under the weight of his body. Even his death he handed to his father's cause, like everything else he had ever been given to carry.
The field went still. The Shakti rose glittering out of him and returned to Indra, finished, spent on a boy from the forest.
Krishna Danced
On the Pandava side men wept. Bhima stood looking at the shape on the ground that had been the child of his one happy season in the forest, the son who had come every single time he was thought of.
And into that grief broke a sound that nobody could at first believe. Krishna was shouting for joy. He clasped Arjuna to his chest and roared like a lion, and then he danced on the chariot like a man whose long fever had broken. The Pandavas stared at him, horrified, and Arjuna asked him to his face what in this night could possibly make him glad.
Krishna told him, and did not soften one word of it. The Shakti is spent. It could not miss, and it was kept for you. While Karna carried it, your death was walking the field in his hand, and I have kept you out of his reach for years because of it. Now it has gone back to Indra, and Karna is a man like other men. Tonight, for the first time in this war, you are alive.
And he went further, because the epic does not protect you from Krishna. Ghatotkacha, he said, was a rakshasa and a despiser of sacrifices, and if the Shakti had not taken him tonight, a day would have come when Krishna himself would have had to see to his death. The spear had only done that work at a better price.
Hear the arithmetic straight, because the story means you to hear it. Bhima's son was spent so that Kunti's son could live. The boy who fought his whole life for a family that never fully claimed him was traded, one life for another, and the one being on that field who had arranged the board said out loud that the trade was good. Yudhishthira could not bear it. He had loved Ghatotkacha, who had guarded them since the forest days, and in his grief he turned toward Karna with his mace in his hand and had to be talked back from it; later Vyasa himself came and spoke to him of what the night had bought. But notice what the epic does not do. Nobody answers Krishna. Nobody refutes him either. His joy is left standing in the middle of the grief, and a retelling that melts it into gentle sorrow has quietly told a different story.
Deep in that night, too tired to lift their arms, the two armies lay down where they stood, among the dead, and slept on the field. When the moon rose they got up and went back to the killing.
Bigger Than the Book
In the Sanskrit Mahabharata Ghatotkacha appears only a handful of times. He is born in the Adi Parva and carries Draupadi in the forest books, and then the Drona Parva gives his death a long stretch of its telling. But India kept him, and grew him. In the Kullu valley he is worshipped to this day; near his mother's temple in Manali, the Hidimba Devi temple, stands a shrine where Ghatotkacha receives his own honours. Telugu country gave him a whole extra life in the folk tale of Sasirekha's wedding, where his maya and his mischief win a bride for his cousin Abhimanyu, and generations have loved him in that shape on the stage and on the screen. In the shadow theatre of Java he became Gatotkaca, the flying warrior with muscles of wire and bones of iron. None of that is in the Drona Parva. All of it is what people do with a figure the epic spent in a single night. They keep giving him back a life.