Yudhishthira

On the fifteenth day of the war Drona is unstoppable, and the Pandava command concludes that he will lay down his weapons only if he believes his son Ashvatthama is dead. An elephant of that name is killed, and Yudhishthira is asked to carry the report, because Drona will believe him and would believe nobody else.

He says that Ashvatthama is dead, and then adds, in a lower voice, that it was the elephant. Krishna has the conches and drums sounded so that the qualification is not heard. Drona lays down his bow, sits in meditation on the floor of his chariot, and Dhrishtadyumna cuts off his head.

The epic attaches a physical penalty. Yudhishthira's chariot had always run a little above the ground, a visible sign of a man who had never lied, and after he speaks it settles onto the earth like anyone else's. The detail is small and it is the whole point: the poem does not argue about whether the deception was justified by necessity, it simply records that something was lost and shows you where.

That is the shape of the character throughout. He is not righteous in the sense of being good at outcomes. He gambles away his family, he holds to agreements that ruin him, he is talked into a lie by a god and pays for it, and the epic keeps him as its measure of dharma anyway, because dharma in this text is a standard you fall short of rather than a rule you can follow safely.

Having refused to enter heaven without the dog, and having been told that the dog was his father Dharma testing him, Yudhishthira is admitted, and the epic immediately does something crueller than anything in the war books.

He is shown Duryodhana, seated in splendour among the gods, honoured as a king who died fighting. He asks where his brothers are, and where Draupadi, and Karna. He is told they are elsewhere, and he asks to be taken there. The path goes down into a place of stench, darkness, mutilated bodies and thorns, and out of it he hears the voices of his brothers and his wife begging him to stay because his presence eases them.

He tells the gods to go back without him. He will remain in hell with his own rather than sit in heaven with the man who caused the war. At that the darkness lifts, and the whole scene is revealed as the final test. Indra explains that every king must see hell once, that his brothers were shown it briefly for their own faults, and that Duryodhana had earned the honour of a warrior's death.

Readers have never been comfortable with that explanation, and the discomfort is deliberate. The poem has spent eighteen books insisting that righteousness is difficult to see and costly to keep, and its last act is to put its most scrupulous character in front of a heaven that appears to have got the accounts backwards, and to have him choose his family over it. The choice, not the explanation, is the answer.