Nakula

Before the royal consecration at Indraprastha the four younger Pandavas are sent out to bring the four directions under Yudhishthira's authority, and Nakula is given the west. The march takes him through the desert country and the western kingdoms, including the lands of his own mother's people, and it is one of the few sustained passages in which he acts on his own rather than as half of a pair. The epic uses these four campaigns to map the world it thinks it is describing, and gives each brother the quarter that suits him.

The same economy governs the year the brothers spend hidden at the court of Virata, which is the most carefully constructed disguise sequence in the epic. Yudhishthira goes in as a brahmin courtier and dice companion, Bhima as a cook and wrestler, Arjuna as a teacher of dance and music living as a woman, Draupadi as a queen's attendant, Sahadeva as a keeper of cattle, and Nakula as Granthika, master of the king's horses. Each cover is the man's real skill with the rank taken off it, which is why the year works as narrative rather than as a trick: they are recognisable to anyone who knows what to look for, and nobody looks.

Horses are Nakula's subject in the way that omens are Sahadeva's. In a text that measures its heroes by archery, the fourth brother is defined by the animal that makes the chariot move, and by the sword rather than the bow.

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.