The Bird's Eye and the Crocodile

Drona's academy at Hastinapura was the finest school of arms the world had ever held, and the most watched. A hundred and five princes of the blood trained there, along with the sons of allies and courtiers, and Drona's own son Ashwatthama among them. The teacher drilled them in every weapon, but the bow above all, for the bow was his own glory. And from early on, the princes understood a thing that was never announced: their teacher was measuring them, always, for a purpose he kept to himself. Drona had not come to Hastinapura to raise soldiers. He had come, though only he knew it yet, to forge the one instrument sharp enough to settle his account with a king in Panchala, and he was looking for the right piece of steel.

One morning Drona had a wooden bird made, painted bright, and set it high in the crown of a distant tree, half hidden among the leaves. Then he called the princes with their bows and set them in a line, and told them the exercise: each in turn would aim at the bird's eye, and hold, and wait for the order to loose. It looked like a test of archery. Every boy in the line had hit smaller marks at greater distances. Some of them may have wondered why the teacher's face was so intent over so easy a shot. They found out one at a time.

Yudhishthira, the eldest, aimed first. Drona let him settle, and then asked, in an idle voice: "What do you see? Tell me all of it. Do you see the tree? The bird? Your brothers, and me?"

"I see them all," said Yudhishthira honestly. "The tree, the bird, you, my brothers, and the sky behind."

"Step aside," said Drona. "You will not take this shot." The eldest prince stepped back, stung and puzzled; he had told the truth, and the truth had failed. One by one they came: Duryodhana, Bhima, the twins, the hundred, Ashwatthama himself. To each the teacher put the same question; from each he received the same honest inventory - tree, bird, sky, teacher, brothers - and to each he said the same words: step aside. The line grew short, and the princes murmured; the test had no visible way to pass.

Then Arjuna took his place and drew, and the yard went quiet, because his stillness was already different; he had gone somewhere and taken nothing with him.

"What do you see?" said Drona. "The tree, the bird, your brothers, myself?"

"I see the eye of the bird," said Arjuna.

"Describe the bird."

"I cannot. I see only the eye."

For a moment the teacher said nothing at all. Then: "Loose." The arrow crossed the whole distance of the morning and took the wooden head off the wooden bird, cut clean at the eye, and it fell down through the leaves. Drona embraced him in front of the whole line, and the princes understood at last what the test had been, and Duryodhana, watching that embrace, added one more item to a private ledger that was already long.

Drona spoke to all of them afterward, for the lesson belonged to everyone even if the embrace did not. "Every one of you told me the truth," he said, "and every truth but one was a confession. Whoever sees the tree is prepared to hit the tree. Whoever sees his brothers has his brothers standing in his arrow's mind. The world will always offer you everything at once; the archer is the man for whom, at the moment of the draw, the world consents to become one small dark point. This cannot be pretended, and I cannot give it to you. I can only find out who has it." What he did not say aloud: he had found out. The instrument he had come to Hastinapura to look for had a name now, and the rest of the school, though it trained a hundred princes more, was in some sense finished business.

The second test came without a wooden bird, and without warning, which was its nature. The teacher went bathing in the Ganga with his students about him, and suddenly a great crocodile had him by the thigh, dragging him toward the deep, and Drona - who could have torn the animal apart with an arrow, a spell, a bare hand - did not. He cried out to his students to save him.

The princes froze. It is the honest freeze of all men before sudden horror: a heartbeat of disbelief, a heartbeat of choosing, a heartbeat of moving. Three heartbeats is very fast. It was three too many. Before any other prince had cleared the disbelief, five arrows had passed through the crocodile under the water, loosed so fast they seemed one act, and the beast fell apart from the teacher's leg. Arjuna had not deliberated, because the aim that admits no second object also admits no delay: seeing and doing had fused in him into a single motion. Drona stood up out of the reddening water, unhurt, and looked at his rescuer with the face of a man whose last question has been answered.

"I staged the danger," he told Arjuna plainly, wringing the river from his hair. "The crocodile was my examination, and you are the only one who passed it before it would have mattered. Now I will give you what I have been keeping." And he gave him the Brahmashira, the head of Brahma, a weapon of the last resort spoken of in whispers even among masters, with its mantras of loosing and - rarer knowledge - of withdrawal. With it he gave the law of it: "Never against men. Against beings not human, against a foe of more than human power, in the extremity of the world: then only. Used on lesser targets it could burn the earth hollow. You are now the keeper of a thing I trust to no one else alive."

No one else alive - except that Drona was a father, and fathers are not examiners. In time Ashwatthama also asked for the Brahmashira, and Drona, who had tested Arjuna twice before trusting him, gave it to his own son untested, knowing him unready, because love kept the account differently than judgment did. The epic remembers both gifts together, for they met at last on the far side of the war: Arjuna and Ashwatthama, the tested keeper and the untested one, each loosing the master's weapon at the other over a ruined world - and only one of them able to call his back. The bird's eye and the crocodile had told Drona the truth about who could carry his knowledge. The tragedy of the teacher is that he heard the answer, and then, where it mattered most, declined to listen.