Bhima

Bhima is the avenging hero in a Kathakali performance witnessed by Estha and Rahel, and the fulfillment of his vow against Dushasana gives the episode its violent climax. Introduced to the twins as Raudra Bhima, the furious aspect of the character, he embodies the transformation of a pledge to defend Draupadi into an overwhelming pursuit of revenge. The performance’s force lies both in its theatrical conventions and in the children’s later, unwitting encounter with a different kind of human violence.

The vow and its cause

The episode begins close to dawn, when Bhima hunts down Dushasana. Dushasana had tried to publicly undress Draupadi after the Kauravas won her in a game of dice. Draupadi vows not to tie up her hair until it has been washed in Dushasana’s blood, and Bhima swears to avenge her honor. The narrative presents the vow as the cause of the confrontation and the measure by which Bhima’s eventual victory is judged.

The account also complicates the moral frame surrounding Draupadi’s humiliation: it notes that she is strangely angry only with the men who won her, not those who staked her. That observation sits beside Bhima’s apparently direct mission of vengeance, exposing the larger injustice behind the immediate contest. His action is directed at Dushasana, but the episode’s origin is a public assault on Draupadi’s dignity and a game in which she is treated as something men can wager.

The battle as performance

Bhima corners Dushasana on a battlefield already strewn with corpses. Their fight does not proceed as an unbroken clash: they fence, trade insults, and recount each other’s wrongs for an hour. When the brass lamp begins to flicker, they call a truce; Bhima pours the oil while Dushasana cleans the charred wick, and then they resume the battle. This pause, with the opponents tending the lamp together before returning to combat, makes the performance’s ritual frame visible even as the story presses toward its violent end.

The struggle spills out of the temple performance space and around the compound. The two performers, in ballooning skirts and velvet blouses, chase one another with papier-mâché maces, circling a sleeping elephant and vaulting over the cluttered ground. Dushasana shifts between bravado and fear, while Bhima toys with him; both are stoned. These theatrical details keep the scene from reading as a simple account of combat. The role is at once a stylized performance, a story of revenge, and a demonstration of how rage can dominate the person who acts through it.

The vow fulfilled

In the early morning, Estha and Rahel watch Bhima fulfill his promise. He defeats Dushasana, and the performance continues beyond the point at which his opponent is dead: Bhima’s actions become an enactment of vengeance with no proportionate stopping point. He then tears open Dushasana’s body, drinks his blood, and goes to find Draupadi so he can bathe her hair in it. The vow is fulfilled, but its fulfillment does not settle Bhima; the account says that he retains an aura of rage even after the killing.

That ending makes the revenge both successful and disturbing. Bhima has met the terms of his promise and answered the wrong done to Draupadi, yet the excess of his response suggests that violence does not simply restore what was violated. The ritual image of Draupadi’s hair, left untied until the blood is brought to her, gives the action a clear objective; Bhima’s continuing fury makes clear that completing the objective is not the same as ending the rage that drove him.

The twins and Raudra Bhima

Comrade K. N. M. Pillai had introduced the twins to Kathakali. Despite Baby Kochamma’s misgivings, he took them and Lenin to all-night performances at the temple, stayed with them until dawn, and explained the art’s language and gestures. When they were six, Estha and Rahel watched this very story with him. The performance was therefore not simply a spectacle they happened upon: it belonged to a childhood introduction to a theatrical tradition that an adult accompanying them helped interpret.

Pillai also introduced them to Raudra Bhima, the enraged, bloodthirsty figure searching for death and vengeance. When the normally good-natured Bhima began to bay and snarl, Pillai explained that he was searching for the beast within himself. The explanation gives the performance a psychological dimension without reducing it to a lesson: the hero’s familiar identity and his ferocious role coexist, and the children are invited to see rage as something that emerges from within a person.

A story watched before its meaning is known

The novel later returns to what Estha and Rahel witnessed that morning. They did not then understand the episode as a demonstration of human beings pursuing ascendancy through structure, order, and complete monopoly; only in retrospect does the narration give their childhood view that political and historical significance. Bhima’s performance thus becomes part of a wider pattern in which the twins see an image before they can grasp its meaning.

The comparison does not equate a staged epic battle with the later real violence the twins witness. Instead, it places the performance within the novel’s inquiry into how power and violence become legible: the children first encounter vengeance in an explicitly theatrical form, with its costumes, gestures, ritual pause, and explained character, before an adult narration connects their witnessing to a broader account of human ascendancy. Bhima’s story remains both a revenge episode and an interpretive frame whose implications exceed what the children knew when they watched it.