Drona and Drupada

Drona was the son of the great sage Bharadvaja, born in an unusual way and raised in a hermitage, and he was poor as only a Brahmin ascetic can be poor. He studied the Vedas and, more than that, he mastered the science of weapons, the dhanurveda, with a completeness few men ever achieved. At the ashram of his father, and later in his own studies, he learned the use of arms, of ordinary and celestial weapons, until he stood among the foremost masters of the bow in the world. But mastery of weapons does not fill a cooking pot, and Drona's life was to be shaped less by his learning than by his poverty.

In his student days Drona shared the ashram with a prince - Drupada, son of the king of Panchala, sent to study alongside the sage's son as princes often were. The two boys grew close. They studied together, played together, shared the long discipline of a hermitage as equals, for in an ashram the king's son and the sage's son eat the same plain food and sleep on the same hard ground. And Drupada, in the warmth of that friendship, made his friend a careless promise. "When my father dies and I am king of Panchala," he said, "half my kingdom will be yours. You and I will share it as we have shared everything here." Drona, a boy with nothing, kept the words in his heart as a treasure. Drupada, a boy with everything, forgot them almost as soon as they were spoken.

They parted when their studies ended, as students do. Drupada returned to Panchala and in time became its king, rich and powerful, ruler of a great northern realm. Drona stayed a poor Brahmin. He married Kripi, the sister of Kripa, and they had a son whom they named Ashwatthama, and Drona loved the boy beyond all reason. But the family was destitute. There came a day Drona would never forget, when the other children of the neighborhood were drinking milk, and his own small son, having never tasted it, was given water whitened with rice-flour by laughing playmates and ran to his father crying with delight that he had drunk milk at last. The boy did not know the difference. Drona did, and the shame of it - that he could not give his only child a cup of milk - burned in him like nothing else in his life.

Driven by that poverty, and hearing that the mighty Parashurama, the warrior-sage, was giving away all his wealth to Brahmins before retiring to the mountains, Drona walked to him to ask for riches. But he came too late. Parashurama had already given away his gold, his lands, everything material. "Only my body and my weapons remain," the sage told him. "Choose." Drona, weapons-master to his bones, chose the weapons. Parashurama taught him the whole of his celestial arsenal and the secrets of their use, so that Drona left the mountain poorer in gold than he had come but richer than any king in the one wealth that could not be eaten or worn - the mastery of arms beyond any living man save a handful. Still, it did not feed Ashwatthama. And so at last Drona remembered the promise of his boyhood friend.

Drona went to Panchala to call in the debt of friendship - not as a beggar, he told himself, but as the friend to whom half a kingdom had been promised. He came into Drupada's court in his worn Brahmin's cloth, walked up to the throne, and greeted the king with the old familiar warmth. "Friend," he said, "I have come to you. Do you remember me?"

Drupada looked down from his throne at the shabby man claiming friendship before his whole court, and what should have been a reunion became the cruelest scene of Drona's life. The king laughed. "Friendship," he said, "exists only between equals. When we were boys we were equals, and so we were friends. But I am a king now and you are a penniless Brahmin. What friendship can there be between a monarch and a mendicant? A poor man is no friend to a rich one, an ignorant man no friend to a learned one, a coward no friend to a hero. Friendship does not survive when one rises and the other does not. I do not even remember promising you anything. Beg from me if you wish, as a Brahmin begs charity from a king, and I may give you a meal and a night's lodging. But do not stand in my court and speak to me of being my equal and my friend."

Drona said nothing. He turned and walked out of the court of Panchala, and in his silence a vow took shape that would outlast both of them. He had been humiliated not for any crime but for his poverty, by a man who had once sworn to share a throne with him. He would not forget it, and he would not forgive it, and he was the greatest master of weapons in the world. He went to Hastinapura, where the Kuru princes needed a teacher, and there - after a display of his skill that astonished the court - he was made guru to the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra and the five sons of Pandu. He asked for no salary. He asked only that, when their training was complete, his students would give him a single fee.

Drona poured his whole mastery into his royal students, and made of one of them, Arjuna, the finest archer the world had seen, binding the boy to him with a promise that none would ever surpass him. When at last their education was complete and the time came for the guru-dakshina, the teacher's fee, Drona named it. "Go into Panchala," he told his students. "Defeat King Drupada in battle and bring him to me alive and bound. That is the only fee I want." It was the revenge he had waited years to take, and he took it through the hands of the very princes he had trained.

The princes marched on Panchala. Duryodhana and the Kauravas attacked first, in pride, and were thrown back by Drupada's army. Then Arjuna went forward with his brothers, broke the Panchala host, and took Drupada captive on his own ground, dragging the proud king bound before the teacher he had insulted. Drona looked at the man who had laughed at him from a throne, now standing humiliated and helpless. "You said friendship is only between equals," Drona said. "Very well. I have taken your kingdom; now I am a king, and your equal again. I give you back half your realm - the southern half I keep, the northern half is yours. Now, if you will have it, we can be friends once more." Then he set Drupada free.

It was meant as a perfect revenge - to defeat the king, take his land, and then offer friendship from a position of conquest, turning Drupada's own words back on him. But Drupada did not feel forgiven. He felt destroyed. He had been beaten and shamed before the world, and he went home consumed by a hatred deeper than Drona's had ever been. He performed a great sacrifice and obtained from the fire two children born to be weapons against Drona: a son, Dhrishtadyumna, fated to kill Drona, and a daughter, Draupadi, whose marriage would bind the Pandavas to Panchala. The careless promise of two boys in an ashram had become a feud, and the feud had become a fire that gave birth to children whose only purpose was to carry it forward. At Kurukshetra it would all come due. Dhrishtadyumna would behead Drona on the field; the sons of Drupada and the son of Drona would destroy one another. A cup of milk a poor child never tasted, and a laugh from a high throne, had lit a war.