The Lie and the Fall of Drona

The night battle took Ghatotkacha and, in taking him, decided the war’s arithmetic in a way the Pandavas could not celebrate. Karna had kept, all this while, the one-use spear Indra had traded him for his armour — kept it, everyone knew, for Arjuna. In the dark Ghatotkacha grew vast with his mother’s night-power and began to annihilate the Kaurava army wholesale, until there was no choice left to Karna but to spend the unspendable spear on him. The spear killed Ghatotkacha and was gone. Krishna, the story says, embraced Arjuna in something close to joy, and told him plainly why: the weapon kept for Arjuna’s death had just been spent on another man, and the price of that had been Bhima’s son. The Pandavas had won the night by losing him. The epic never lets a relief arrive unpriced.

Drona, by day again, became unbearable. Grieving, furious, no longer restrained by anything, the old teacher fought with weapons that ordinary war did not survive and the Pandava army began simply to come apart in front of him. Krishna said the thing aloud that the parva had been moving toward: Drona could not be beaten while he held his bow, and he would not lay down his bow while his son Ashwatthama lived. The way to the teacher ran through a lie about the one thing he loved, and Krishna proposed it without pretending it was clean — tell Drona that Ashwatthama is dead, and he will set down his weapons, and then he can be killed; there is no other door, and this war has stopped having clean doors.

Bhima killed an elephant that happened to be named Ashwatthama and went through the line shouting that Ashwatthama was dead. Drona did not believe the army; he believed only one man in the world incapable of a lie — Yudhishthira. He went to Yudhishthira across the field and asked him, directly, whether his son was dead, and the whole epic narrows to that one question put to that one man. And Yudhishthira — the son of Dharma, who had never spoken a false word, whose chariot was said to ride a hand’s breadth off the ground because of it — said: Ashwatthama is dead. And then, unable fully to lie and unable fully to tell the truth, he added, almost inaudibly, the elephant — and Krishna’s conch and the army’s roar were arranged to drown the last two words exactly as they were spoken. The chariot, the story notes without comment, came down and touched the earth.

Drona heard the sentence and not the qualification. The grief took the fight out of him in an instant. He set down his bow in the middle of the battle, sat in the posture of meditation in his chariot, turned his mind from the war, and gave his life up himself, withdrawing from his body before any weapon reached him. And Dhrishtadyumna — Drupada’s fire-born son, brought into the world for precisely this and nothing else — climbed onto the chariot of the unresisting, unarmed, meditating teacher and cut off his head, against every law of the war and every plea of the watching men, keeping a promise the story had made in the Adi Parva.

The teacher was dead, killed by a lie spoken by the one man who could not lie, his head taken by a man born to take it, in a war that no longer contained a single unbroken rule. Even the Pandavas could not call it victory cleanly, and the parva does not let them. The Kaurava army, leaderless twice over now, turned to its last great archer — the man who had stood out of the war while Bhishma lived, the eldest brother of the men he was about to lead the war against. They made Karna their commander.