The Mahabharata ends with a walk. The five brothers and Draupadi renounce the kingdom, turn north, and set out on foot for the mountain, and one by one they fall on the road. A dog follows them. Yudhishthira, walking in front, does not look back, and each time one falls Bhima asks why, and is given a reason.
Draupadi falls first, and the reason given is that she loved Arjuna above the others. Sahadeva falls next, from pride in his own learning. Nakula falls third, and the fault named is his conviction that there was no one as handsome as himself. Arjuna falls for boasting he could finish the enemy in a day, Bhima for gluttony and for the same boasting. Only Yudhishthira and the dog reach the top.
The reckoning is worth reading closely, because it is not a moral scoreboard of the war. Nobody is charged here with the killing at Kurukshetra, with the foul blow, with the lie told to Drona or with the wager of a wife. The faults that stop them are small vanities. The poem, having spent eighteen books on the largest possible questions of duty and slaughter, closes its accounts on the ordinary self regard that people carry through a whole life without noticing.
Nakula, whose beauty the epic itself keeps mentioning, is undone by having believed it. The other detail the last books preserve about him is domestic: a wife, Karenumati of Chedi, and a son, Niramitra, who inherits nothing that matters to the story.