Drona and the Thumb of Ekalavya

Drona was a brahmin who had grown up beside a prince. As a boy he had shared his lessons and his sport with Drupada, son and heir of the king of Panchala, and Drupada — in the easy way boys pledge what is not yet theirs — had promised that when he came to rule, half of all he had would be Drona’s for the asking. Boys forget such promises. Men remember them, especially when the years go badly.

Drona’s years went badly. He studied the science of arms under his own father and then under the formidable Parashurama, and emerged a master with no fortune to show for mastery. He married, and had a son, Ashwatthama, whom he loved past reason; and he grew so poor that the child cried for milk the household could not buy, and was quieted with flour stirred into water and told that it was milk. There is a specific shame in watching that, and it does not make a man gentler. Drona remembered Drupada’s old promise and went to Panchala to ask for what had been pledged.

Drupada, a king now and long past the boy who had pledged it, looked at the threadbare man addressing him as friend before the court, and laughed. Friendship, he said, holds only between equals; a king and a destitute brahmin had never been friends and could not become them by the brahmin’s wishing it; he might have alms, as any beggar might, but not a kingdom and not the word friend. Drona left without answering. The silence he carried out of that hall had a date on it, though no one there could have read it.

He came to Hastinapura, and Bhishma, who knew precisely who he was and what he could do, made him master of arms to every prince of the house. Under Drona the boys became soldiers. Duryodhana and Bhima grew terrible with the mace, Yudhishthira exact with the spear, the twins quick and clean with the sword. But it was Arjuna who undid the teacher’s evenhandedness — Arjuna who practised in the dark only to learn to loose by sound alone, who ate little and slept less because skill was the one thing he wanted more than comfort. Drona came to love him the way a master loves the student who proves the master’s life worth something, and made him a private promise: that he would make Arjuna the first archer in the world, with no equal anywhere. He meant it absolutely, and that absolute meaning carried, folded inside it, a price that would be paid by someone else.

For there was a boy named Ekalavya, son of a forest chieftain of the Nishada people, who came to Drona and asked to be taught the bow. Drona refused him: the boy was not of the order to which such teaching was given, and there was, besides, the promise to Arjuna that no one would be his equal. Ekalavya went back into the forest without protest. He shaped an image of Drona out of clay, set it up before him as one sets up a teacher, and trained himself in its presence with a devotion so total that the clay became, to him, a living master, and he became an archer past anything the princes could do. One day, hunting, they found him in the wood, and Arjuna watched a stranger out-shoot him and felt the floor of his world tilt: Drona’s promise, the thing he had been given to live on, was being broken in front of him by a boy in deerskin.

Drona went to Ekalavya. The boy fell at his feet, naming him teacher, for the clay one had become real through the years of devotion. And Drona, to keep one promise whole, asked the fee that the story sets down without a word of comment and lets the reader carry alone: he asked, as guru-dakshina — the teacher’s due for instruction — for Ekalavya’s right thumb, the thumb that draws the string, for lessons he had refused ever to give. Ekalavya cut it from his own hand and laid it before the image’s master without an instant’s hesitation, and went on living in the forest, a great archer no longer, his greatness paid into another man’s promise.

Mark this, because the epic will do it again and again, in larger forms, until it has done it to everyone: it sets a vow on one side of the scale and a living person on the other, and then watches, without flinching and without forgiving, to see which way its good men let the balance fall.