Karna

Drona turned Karna away when he came asking to learn the brahmastra, telling him plainly that such weapons went only to a proper brahmin or a trained kshatriya, and a charioteer's son was neither. Stung, Karna rode to the mountain where the warrior-sage Parashurama lived in retreat and told him a different story: that he was a brahmin of Bhrigu's line who wanted only to master the bow. Parashurama, who hated kshatriyas after avenging his own father on their whole class, believed him, took him in, and spent years teaching him every weapon he knew, the Brahma weapon among them.

The lie came apart on an ordinary afternoon. Parashurama, tired from a walk, lay down to rest with his head in Karna's lap and fell asleep. A large insect settled on Karna's thigh and began to burrow into the flesh, drawing blood, and Karna would not so much as shift his leg for fear of waking his guru. The blood ran far enough to reach Parashurama's own face and woke him anyway. Seeing the wound and the insect still fastened there, he understood at once that no brahmin's body could have borne such an injury without a sound, and Karna, cornered, admitted the truth: he was a suta's son, neither brahmin nor kshatriya by right, who had lied his way into the one teacher who would take an archer with no family behind him.

Parashurama's fury did not stay hot for long, but the curse was already spoken: at the moment Karna needed his greatest weapon most, to save his own life, the mantra to call it would desert his memory. Once his anger had cooled, the sage softened enough to add that Karna's name would still live on afterwards as the finest archer the world had seen. Karna left the ashram in disgrace, and from there made his way to Duryodhana's court at Hastinapura.

As the Pandavas' thirteenth year of exile drew close, Indra grew afraid for Arjuna, because Karna's natural armour and earrings made him impossible to kill in battle. The king of the gods decided to beg the armour away from him disguised as a brahmin. Surya saw the plan forming and came to Karna in a dream first, warning him plainly that the beggar at his door would be Indra himself, and urging him to refuse or, failing that, to demand something worth having in exchange: Indra's own infallible dart, the Shakti, which could kill any single enemy it was thrown at.

Karna had sworn years before never to turn away anyone who asked him for alms during his midday worship of the sun, and he would not break that vow even to save his own life. At noon the next day, an old brahmin appeared at the riverbank exactly as Surya had warned and asked, weakly, for the one gift he wanted: the kavacha and kundala, cut from Karna's own body. Karna offered him wealth, land, cattle, anything else he could name, but the brahmin refused every substitute and reminded him, gently, that he was known never to refuse an almsgiver at this hour.

Karna kept his word. He tore the armour from his chest and cut the earrings from his ears with his own hands and gave them away, and the god who received them was moved to tears by the gift. Indra offered him a boon in return, and Karna, remembering his promise to Surya, asked for the Shakti. Indra granted it, but bound the weapon with one condition: Karna could throw it only once, against a single enemy, and after that single throw it would return to Indra's hand for good.

Bhishma had needled Karna about his rank for years, and in one war council he went further than usual, comparing him to little more than half a warrior. Karna would not sit through it again. He rose and told Bhishma to his face that he had always played the Kurus' enemy in the guise of a friend, and pressed Duryodhana to cast the old man aside altogether.

Matters came to a head when Duryodhana asked Bhishma to lead the army. Bhishma agreed on one condition: he would not fight alongside Karna at all, and Duryodhana would have to choose between them. Karna settled the standoff himself before it could break the army in two. He would not fight, he announced, for as long as Bhishma commanded, and would take up arms again only once Bhishma had fallen.

He held to that vow through ten days of war. On the night Bhishma was finally struck down and lay dying on his bed of arrows, Karna rode alone across the darkened battlefield to find him, picking his way past torches and circling vultures until he reached the old commander's side. He fell at Bhishma's feet and named himself plainly: Radha's son, the one Bhishma had always looked on with contempt.

Bhishma's anger had already gone out of him. He asked Karna, gently, to make peace with the Pandavas now and let the war end with his own fall, but Karna would not abandon Duryodhana, the one man besides his foster mother who had ever honoured him. Seeing his mind was made up, Bhishma forgave every hard word that had passed between them and sent him off with a blessing: to fight and, if it came to it, to die as a kshatriya should.

Bhishma praised the five Pandavas once again for subduing the whole earth together and holding a Rajasuya sacrifice on the strength of it, and the comparison stung Karna exactly as Bhishma intended. He needed no brothers, he told Duryodhana. Give him an army and he would conquer the earth alone and bring every king in it to pay tribute for a sacrifice of Duryodhana's own.

He was as good as his word. Over the better part of a year Karna's army struck first at Panchala, forcing tribute from Drupada himself, then swept north against the Himalayan kings and Bhagadatta, east through the Angas, Kalingas, and Magadhans, south to defeat Rukmi, and west to draw tribute from the Yavana kings and peace from the Avantis. He came home to Hastinapura with more wealth than the city could easily hold.

Duryodhana wanted to crown the triumph with a Rajasuya of his own, to match the Pandavas measure for measure, but his priests told him it could not be done while Yudhishthira and his own father Dhritarashtra both still lived. In its place they offered the Vaishnava sacrifice, a rite older and rarer than the Rajasuya itself. Duryodhana accepted it, performed it with the wealth Karna had won for him, and told the assembled court plainly that without Karna none of it would have been possible. Karna answered with an oath of his own, breaking a wine cup on the floor as he swore it: no wine and no meat would pass his lips again until Arjuna was dead.

Karna's chariot wheel sank into the earth in the middle of his final duel with Arjuna, exactly as a brahmin had cursed years before, and no effort from Karna or his charioteer Shalya could work it free while Arjuna's arrows kept falling. A snake named Aswasena rose from beneath the field and offered to guide Karna's next arrow straight to Arjuna's throat. Karna refused him outright, insisting he needed no help to beat any enemy of his. Spurned, the snake struck at Arjuna alone, and only Krishna's warning let Arjuna cut it out of the air before it reached him.

Desperate, Karna reached for the one weapon left that might still turn the fight: the brahmastra, the most powerful mantra he knew. He could not remember it. The curse Parashurama had laid on him years before, that his greatest weapon would desert his memory at the moment he needed it most, closed on him exactly as promised, and he was left fighting on with ordinary arrows while his strength failed.

Still wrestling with the buried wheel, Karna called out to Arjuna to hold off and give him a moment to free it, appealing to the old rule that no true warrior struck at a man standing defenceless. Krishna answered him instead of Arjuna, and answered hard: he asked where that same rule had been when Draupadi was dragged into the assembly and threatened, when the dice game robbed Yudhishthira of his kingdom, and when the wax house at Varanavata was set alight to kill five sleeping brothers. There was no mercy owed here, Krishna told Arjuna, and no reason left to wait.

Arjuna drew the anjalika, a huge arrow shaped like a thunderbolt, and loosed it. It caught Karna full in the neck while he still strained at the wheel and killed him instantly, his head thrown to the ground and his body collapsing where he knelt. As it fell, a light rose out of him and climbed into the sky until it entered the sun. The Pandava camp broke into drums and celebration. On the other side of the field, the Kauravas could only stand and stare at what was left of him.