On the eve of the great war, Arjuna was not the only one who wished he could simply walk away. Long before, in the years of exile, his brother Bhima had once said the same thing.

The Pandavas were hiding in the forest, and Bhima — strongest of them all, with arms like tree trunks — had grown sick of fighting. A demon had been troubling a village, eating travellers on the forest road, and the people came begging for help.

"Let someone else go," Bhima grumbled, sitting heavily under a sal tree. "I am tired of being the one who fights. I will lay down my mace. I want only to rest." And he folded his great arms and turned his face away.

His mother Kunti said nothing. She only waited.

That night the screams came from the road. A family — a mother, a father, a small child — had been caught by the demon at the edge of the trees. Bhima heard the child cry out in the dark.

He did not decide to move. His body was already moving. His feet were already running, his hand had already found his mace, before his mind had finished its sentence. The forest blurred past him. By the time he reached the road he was roaring, and the demon that had terrified a whole village met a force it could not stand against.

Afterward, breathing hard, the rescued child asleep against his shoulder, Bhima sat down on the road and laughed — a tired, honest laugh.

"I told myself I would never fight again," he said to the night. "What a foolish promise. The moment a child cried, my own nature answered before I could stop it. I am made to protect. Pretending otherwise was like a river promising not to flow."

From that day Bhima stopped fighting his own nature and started guiding it — fighting when protecting was needed, resting when it was not. The strength was never going to leave him. The only real choice was whether he would carry it with wisdom or be carried off by it.