The story

Krishna found his brother sitting alone under a tree, lost in thought.

Three men had followed Balarama's trail away from the slaughter at Prabhasa: Krishna, his charioteer Daruka, and Babhru. Krishna sent Daruka straight to the Kurus. Tell Arjuna, he said, that the Yadavas are dead by the brahmanas' curse, and let him come quickly. He sent Babhru back to guard the women, so that robbers would not harm them for their wealth. Babhru had gone only a short way when a club loosed from a hunter's trap struck him down; the curse had reached him too.

Krishna asked Balarama to wait and went into Dvaraka. He told his father Vasudeva to protect the women until Arjuna came. He had seen the end of the Kurus, he said, and now the end of the Yadus, and he could not bear to look at the city without them. He would go into the forest with Balarama and practise austerity. He touched his father's feet and left. Behind him the women began to wail, and he turned back to promise them that Arjuna would come.

When he reached the forest, Balarama was sitting in yoga, and out of his mouth came a great white serpent, thousand-headed, as vast as a mountain. It left the human body behind and went down to the ocean, where the sea itself, the great nagas — serpent lords such as Vasuki and Takshaka — and the god Varuna came out to welcome it.

Then Krishna was alone. He wandered in the empty forest and sat down on the bare ground. He knew, the text says, every road a creature can take. He remembered what Gandhari had said to him over her dead sons, and something the sage Durvasa had once told him. He judged that the time of his own going had come. He held in his senses, his speech and his mind, and lay down in the great yoga.

A hunter named Jara — the word means old age — came by looking for deer. He saw something lying there, took it for a deer, and shot. The arrow went into the sole of Krishna's foot. Jara ran up to claim his kill and found a man in yellow cloth, many-armed, absorbed in yoga. He knew he had done wrong and caught hold of his feet. Krishna comforted him. Then he rose, filling earth and sky with his splendour. The gods and sages came out to meet him, and Narayana, the master of yoga, went to his own place.

Daruka reached Hastinapura with the news, and Arjuna went to Dvaraka. He found it, the text says, like a woman whose husband has died. Krishna's wives cried out at the sight of him, and he fell to the ground in tears. Then he went to his uncle Vasudeva, lying broken with grief, and the old man gave him Krishna's last message. Arjuna is I, Krishna had said, and I am Arjuna; do what he says. Arjuna would see to the women and children and to Vasudeva's own funeral, and the moment he left, the sea would flood the city.

Arjuna answered that he too could not live long in a world without Krishna; his brothers and Draupadi were of one mind with him, and their own time was near. In seven days everyone would leave for Indraprastha, where Krishna's grandson Vajra would be king. The next morning Vasudeva died by yoga, and four of his wives went onto his pyre. Arjuna performed the rites, did the same for the dead at Prabhasa, and had the bodies of Balarama and Krishna found and burned.

On the seventh day the long column set out: women, old men, children, servants. As the last of them left, the ocean rose and swept over Dvaraka with all its jewels.

In the land of the five rivers, Abhira herdsmen armed only with sticks saw a vast train of women guarded by one archer and a few spent soldiers, and they attacked. Arjuna laughed and told them to turn back if they wanted to live. Then he tried to string Gandiva and could barely do it. He tried to call his divine weapons to mind and could not remember them. His arrows ran out, and he beat at the robbers with the end of his bow. In front of him women were dragged off, and some, the text says, went of their own accord. He brought what remained to Kurukshetra and settled them.

Then he went to Vyasa, who took one look at him and asked whether he had been beaten in battle — he looked like a man whose fortune had left him. Arjuna told him everything, and ended with what hurt most. The dark, four-armed figure with conch, discus and mace, who used to go before his chariot burning up the enemy so that Arjuna's arrows only finished what was already destroyed — he could not see him anymore.

Vyasa's answer is the last teaching of the book. The Yadavas were burned up by a brahmana's curse, and Krishna, who could have turned the curse aside, had chosen not to. He had gone before Arjuna's chariot out of love, and having lifted the earth's burden he had gone back to his own place. Strength, intelligence and power, Vyasa said, come in the time of rising and fail in the time of reversal; time is the root of all of it. The weapons had done their work and gone back where they came from. And then: the time had come for the Pandavas, too, to take the highest road.

Arjuna went home and told Yudhishthira everything. The epic's last journey begins from that report — not from a defeat in battle, but from a hero who found, on an ordinary road, that what had made him a hero had never been his alone.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• Balarama — Krishna's elder brother, who taught both Bhima and Duryodhana the mace, took no side, and raged at the blow that ended the war.
• Arjuna — The archer the whole war is arranged around, who arrives at its opening unable to lift his bow because of who is standing on the other side.
• Vyasa — The poet of the epic and the father of its two kings, who keeps walking into his own story to tell its people what is coming.
• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• Theme: Renunciation and release
• Theme: Curse and consequence

Elsewhere in this parva

• The iron pestle — Young Yadavas dress Krishna's son as a pregnant woman to mock three sages, and the sages say he will give birth to his people's end

Questions to explore

• Why does Krishna die from a hunter's stray arrow?
• Why did Arjuna lose his strength and his weapons after Krishna died?
• What did Vyasa mean when he told Arjuna that time is the root of everything?