Bhima

The One Who Went at His Mother’s Word

At Ekachakra the Brahmin who shelters the brothers weeps with his family: by the town’s rota it is his turn to send the rakshasa Baka his meal, and a human being with it. Kunti brings the Brahmin to Bhima and asks him to take on the hard thing, and his answer is four words long: “I will do it.” Yudhishthira comes home and asks his mother what task she has given the man on whose arms they all sleep soundly at night, and Kunti tells him to have no fear for Bhima. In the morning Bhima carries Baka’s food into the forest and sits down in front of the rakshasa to eat it himself. Baka curses him, rains blows on his back, and Bhima never lifts his head until the last of the meal is gone; then he rises, and Baka’s back breaks across his knee, and the body is left at the town gate before dawn without anyone seeing who brought it. In the hall of the Panchalas, when the kings rise in fury because Drupada’s daughter has garlanded a young man in a Brahmin’s dress, Bhima tears up a great tree, strips its leaves, and stands beside Arjuna with it, and lifts Shalya, king of Madra, in his arms and throws him clear; by that feat Krishna knows the two for Kunti’s sons. In Jarasandha’s capital, when three men in Brahmins’ dress challenge the king of Magadha, Jarasandha chooses Bhima to fight, and the two wrestle without food or rest from the first day of the fortnight to the thirteenth. When the king tires, Krishna says it: “Show him today the strength you have been fortunate enough to receive, the power you inherited from your father, the wind god Maruta.” Bhima lifts Jarasandha into the air, whirls him a hundred times overhead, and presses his knee against the king’s backbone and breaks his body in two.

The Vows Made in the Hall

In the dice hall Bhima’s first anger rises against his own brother. Yudhishthira has staked Draupadi, and Bhima turns to Arjuna: “If I had not known that the king acted by Kshatriya usage, Arjuna, I would have taken both his hands by main force and burned them in a blazing fire.” Then Duhshasana drags Draupadi into the hall by her hair, and Bhima, wringing his hands, his lips trembling, speaks before all the kings: “If Bhima, the son of Pritha, does not tear your breast open in battle and drink your lifeblood, may he never reach the worlds of the blessed.” Duryodhana pulls back the cloth from his left thigh and shows it to Draupadi where she cannot help seeing it, and the second vow follows: “May Bhima never reach the worlds his ancestors have reached, if he does not break that thigh of yours in the great battle.” Sparks of fire come from every organ of his senses, as sparks come from every crack in the trunk of a burning tree. After the second game Duhshasana dances through the hall crying “Cow, cow,” and as the brothers walk out Bhima counts off what is coming: Duryodhana felled by his mace and his foot set on the man’s head, “and this other wicked man, Duhshasana, who is so bold with his tongue: I will drink his blood as a lion does.” Thirteen months later, by the lake at Dvaitavana, he stands before Yudhishthira and speaks the way a man speaks who has held his tongue for thirteen months. The kingdom was taken by loaded dice, “the way a weak offal-eating jackal snatches the kill from mighty lions,” and crying dharma, dharma, the king has lost his manhood; let the army march on Hastinapura today. Yudhishthira‘s answer is one of the steadiest sentences in the poem: “Kingdom, sons, fame, wealth, all of them together do not come up to a sixteenth part of truth.” Bhima comes back from the other side, arguing from time, that by the reckoning of the wise thirteen months already count as thirteen years, and that fails too.

The Tail That Would Not Move

On Gandhamadana the wind carries a saugandhika lotus to Draupadi, and she wants more, and Bhima sets off alone to find them. In a grove of plantain trees a monkey lies across the path and will not get up. Bhima tells him that Hanuman, who leaped a hundred yojanas of sea in a single bound, is his own brother, that he is Hanuman’s equal in strength, and that the monkey can clear the road or see what he can do. “Be kind to me and go on; only move my tail out of your way.” Bhima takes the monkey for a creature with no energy in him and catches the tail with his left hand, carelessly, and it does not stir. He takes it in both arms and pulls; his brows knit, his eyes roll, his whole body runs with sweat, and the tail stays where it is. He goes around to the monkey’s side with his face lowered in shame, joins his palms, and asks who he is, and when the monkey gives his name Bhima bows to him and says, “No one is more fortunate than I am. Today I have seen my elder brother.” In the same forest he cuts off the head of Jatasura, who had carried off Draupadi and three of the brothers in a Brahmin’s disguise; at the lake of the Yaksha he finds his brothers lying dead, decides that today there will have to be a fight, and drinks first so as to be fit for it, giving the voice’s questions no answer at all, and drops down dead where he stands. In Virata’s city the same man is Ballava the cook, and at the festival of Brahma he catches the wrestler Jimuta in his arms as a lion catches an elephant, swings him a hundred times, and kills him. When Kichaka kicks Draupadi before the whole court, she comes to the kitchen at night, and Bhima covers his face with his wife’s hands, soft hands now hard with calluses, and weeps into them. Then he tells her that this news gives him the joy he felt when he killed Hidimba, and that night, in the dark of the dancing hall, he crushes Kichaka’s head as an elephant crushes a wood-apple.

Blood, and a Thigh

On the seventeenth day of the war Bhima’s mace smashes Duhshasana’s chariot, and in that moment he remembers the hair dragged across the hall and every insult laid on Draupadi while her husbands sat with their faces turned away. He tells Karna and Duryodhana that he will kill Duhshasana now, and whoever can protect him should try. He leaps down from his chariot, sets his foot on Duhshasana’s throat, cuts open his chest where he lies, and drinks his warm life-blood. “I count the taste of my enemy’s blood above my mother’s milk, above honey, above clarified butter, above good wine made from honey, above sweet water, above milk and curds and buttermilk, above every drink on earth that is sweet as nectar.” Every soldier near enough to see him drink runs, and as they run they tell one another, “That is no human being,” and, “This Bhima must be a Rakshasa.” The poem hides none of it and softens none of it. Soaked in blood, Bhima tells Krishna and Arjuna that the first vow is kept and the second is next. The second comes on the eighteenth day, with Balarama, teacher of both men in the mace, back from his pilgrimage and seated to watch. Duryodhana strikes Bhima on the head and on the chest and stuns him, and Krishna tells Arjuna that by the rules of fair combat Bhima will never win. “At the time of the dice, Dhananjaya, Bhima vowed that in battle he would break Suyodhana’s thighs with his mace. Let Bhima keep that vow.” Arjuna slaps his own left thigh before Bhima’s eyes. Duryodhana leaps to avoid a blow, and while he is in the air Bhima’s hurled mace breaks both his thighs. Bhima walks up to the fallen king. “O wretch, once you laughed at the disrobed Draupadi in the assembly and called us, fool, ‘Cow, Cow!’ Bear now the fruit of that insult!” And he touches the head of his fallen foe with his left foot. Yudhishthira rebukes him. Balarama raises his arms and cries, “Fie on Bhima, fie on Bhima!” and rushes at him with his plow, and Krishna holds him back: the vow was sworn in the hall, and the sage Maitreya had long ago cursed Duryodhana with exactly this, so “for all this I see no fault in Bhima.” Balarama leaves saying that by killing a righteous king unfairly the son of Pandu will be known in the world as a crooked warrior.

The Iron Statue, and Fifteen Years

After the war, on the bank of the Ganga, Dhritarashtra embraces Yudhishthira and then feels about for Bhima, and Krishna, who has read the old king’s mind beforehand, pulls the real Bhima back and sets in front of him a statue of Bhima made of iron. Believing he holds Bhima himself in flesh and blood, the king crushes it to pieces with the strength of ten thousand elephants, crushes his own chest doing it, vomits blood, and weeps, “Alas, Bhima! Alas, Bhima!” Krishna tells him that he has killed no one; it was an iron figure, and the real man was pulled out of his embrace because Krishna knew what was in his heart. For fifteen years after that Dhritarashtra lives in the palace honored like a father, and there is one heart in that palace in which the hall of the dice game has never stopped burning. One day Bhima stands among his friends where Dhritarashtra and Gandhari can hear him and slaps his armpits, the gesture of a wrestler about to fight. “The sons of the blind king, who could fight with every kind of weapon, have all been sent to the other world by me, with these two arms that are like a pair of iron clubs.” Gandhari treats the words as untrue and bears them; Dhritarashtra breaks inside and asks leave to go to the forest. He wants to make gifts for the dead from the wealth Bhima won, and Bhima answers in anger that the brothers will perform the rites for Bhishma and Drona themselves; has the king forgotten who asked Vidura in the dice hall whether the stake had been won? Yudhishthira silences him. On the day of the departure that same Bhima walks behind the old king with his throat tight, and when Kunti walks out of the city with the old couple he asks her where this wish came from, now that the kingdom is won and the time has come to enjoy it. On the great journey, on the climb into the Himalaya, Draupadi falls, then Sahadeva, then Nakula, then Arjuna, and each time Bhima stops to ask why, and each time Yudhishthira answers without breaking stride. Then Bhima falls. “Look at me, my king. I am the one you love, and I have fallen. For what reason have I gone down? Tell me, if you know it.” “You were a great eater, Bhima, and you used to boast of your strength. When you ate, you never gave a thought to what others needed. That is why you have fallen.” And Yudhishthira goes on without looking back, with only a dog beside him.

His Path

Hidimba, Ghatotkacha, and Shelter at Ekachakra · A rakshasa dragged thirty-two cubits from the sleepers, and a promise from which Ghatotkacha was born.

The Wrestling Match with Jarasandha · Thirteen days of grappling, one sentence from Krishna, and a backbone broken across a knee.

The Forest Retreat of Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, and Kunti · Armpits slapped after fifteen years, and the same man walking behind the blind king on the day he leaves.

The Man Who Kept Every Word with His Body

Strength keeps arriving in Bhima’s life, and each time a promise arrives with it. A word to Hidimba’s sister, and Ghatotkacha; two words to his mother, and Baka’s broken back; two vows in the hall, blood and a thigh, and both kept on the seventeenth and eighteenth days, one in a way that makes an army call him a rakshasa, the other in a way that brings his own teacher at him with a plow. The poem sets Krishna’s defense and Balarama’s curse side by side over the same fallen king and flattens neither. In the middle of all that strength stand two scenes where strength is no use: a tail that would not move, where bowing his head wins him an elder brother; and an iron statue that is broken in his place. For fifteen years the dice hall burns in him, and on the day the blind king leaves he still walks behind him weeping. Yudhishthira‘s answer on the mountain is the account of that same strength: when he ate, he never gave a thought to what others needed. The strength that broke the rock stayed with him to the end; every word that came with it was kept with his body, and his body paid for it.