‘Oh... Don’t you know that it’s the custom for sutas always to wear armour next to the skin?’ And Karna was happy to elaborate.
‘If you’re a chariot driver for a kshatriya, it’s very dangerous because you might get hit by the opponent’s arrows by mistake, even though they’re not supposed to aim for drivers. So we still need to wear armour. But you don’t want to risk being mistaken for your ratha by showing your armour. So we wear it next to the skin, underneath our clothes.’
Karna had prepared further embroidery to try to justify his wearing the armour for wrestling. But the little kshatriya princes seemed satisfied with the fundamental fact that he was different from them. And Karna was able to give similar excuses to explain why he never went swimming with the princes. ‘It is a custom
