Ask most people how many sons the blind king of the Mahabharata had and the answer comes back: a hundred. It is very nearly right. He had a hundred and one, and the hundred and first almost never appears in a retelling, which is a shame, because he does the single most surprising thing anybody does in the entire war — and he does it before a single arrow is fired.
The morning offer
The armies are drawn up. Eighteen armies' worth of men are standing in formation, waiting. And in that last stretch of silence, the eldest of the five brothers does something that is not in any battle plan. He walks out and calls across the open ground, loudly enough for both sides to hear, an offer addressed to nobody in particular and everybody at once.
He who will choose us, him we shall choose for our ally.
That is the whole thing. Not a negotiation, not a private overture carried by a messenger at night. An open invitation, shouted in daylight, in front of two armies, on the one morning it was possible to accept it.
The one who crossed
Out of the hundred and one, one man came forward. Born in the same palace as the rest, to a different mother. His name was Yuyutsu, which translates to something like: the one who wishes to fight.
And the epic is specific about how he went, which is the detail that makes the scene. He did not slip away in the confusion or defect quietly in the night. He crossed the open field in front of everybody, and the account records that he went over with the beat of drums and cymbals.
What became of him
He fought the war on the other side, and he survived it. His hundred brothers did not — every one of them died on that field across the eighteen days, and their mother, who had tied a cloth over her own eyes for life out of loyalty to their father, outlived all of them.
Afterwards Yuyutsu remained, and the epic keeps him in the story: he is given responsibility in the kingdom the war produced, and he is among the small handful of people from that generation still standing at the end of it.
The timing is the part to keep
It was not a secret offer, and it was not a difficult one to hear. It was called out in the open, to everyone, at the top of somebody's voice. The other hundred were standing right there when it was made. They stayed where they were, and stayed there until they died.
The offer was open for one morning.
Written by Anurag Joshi — Author, Killing Bhishma. Notes kept while the book was being written.