The Stranger at the Well

Outside the walls of Hastinapura, where the training grounds gave way to scrub and old wells long gone dry, the young princes of the Kuru house had gathered for their morning game. Arjuna and Duryodhana, still boys, played at catching and throwing with the same fierce concentration they brought to the bow, while Kripa, who had taught them their first lessons in arms, was back in the city.

The ball left Arjuna's hand wide, struck the cracked earth once, and rolled to the lip of an old well before dropping out of sight. The boys ran to the rim and looked down into a shaft gone dry years before, its walls furred with dust, the ball a small pale shape far below, past the reach of any arm and any rope they could think to lower.

Duryodhana flung a stone after it in frustration, which only pushed the ball deeper into the dark. Arjuna knelt at the edge and turned his own bow this way and that in his hands, sighting and reconsidering, unable to find a shot that would lift rather than merely strike. For all their training, none of the princes of the ruling house of Bharata could solve a well.

They were still arguing over who might be lowered down on a rope when a thin figure came walking along the road from the forest, robes dusty, a bow slung across his shoulder, and stopped to watch the huddle of princes at the well's edge with open amusement.

"Fie on the strength of your arms," the stranger said, laughing outright, "and fie on your archery, if you call yourselves kshatriyas and cannot lift a ball from a well." Duryodhana's face darkened at once, and he snapped back that a beggar who mocked princes should first show what he could do that they could not.

The brahmin only laughed harder. He was gaunt and travel-worn, his robes patched, yet he carried himself with none of a beggar's humility, and there was something in the set of his shoulders, and in the bow across his back, that did not belong to a wandering mendicant. Arjuna studied him more closely now, sensing a discipline under the dust.

"Promise me a meal today," the stranger said, "and with blades of grass I will bring up your ball, and this ring as well." He slipped the ring from his finger and dropped it into the well after the ball.

Arjuna, curious rather than offended, crouched by the well and asked how any hand could reach so far down a dry shaft for nothing but a meal as payment. The stranger did not answer directly. He only asked, almost gently now, whether the princes of Hastinapura had never been taught that grass, in the right hands, could do more than a rope.

Duryodhana folded his arms, unconvinced. Arjuna alone leaned further over the rim, eyes fixed on the stranger's hands as he stooped and began pulling blades of long grass from the verge of the path, one after another, as though selecting arrows.

The stranger knelt at the well's mouth, murmured words under his breath that none of the princes caught, and cast the first blade of grass down into the dark like a loosed arrow. It struck the ball and held there, fixed as if nailed. He took a second blade, spoke over it the same way, and sent it down after the first, so that it caught in the blade already lodged, joining to it. A third followed the second, and a fourth the third, each grass blade seizing the one before it, until a fine unbroken chain hung from the ball to a hand's breadth below the rim.

Then, with no more effort than a man drawing water, he lifted, and the ball rose out of the well's mouth on its woven leash of grass and dropped into his open palm. The princes stared in a silence that Duryodhana's pride could not immediately break.

The princes begged him to bring up the ring too, and at once. "That one needs no grass," the stranger said, watching their faces. He took the bow from his shoulder, sent a single arrow down the shaft to pierce the ring, drew it up still threaded on the arrow, and coolly handed it to the astonished princes.

Arjuna let out a breath he had been holding. Even Duryodhana, who trusted nothing that flattered another man's skill, could find no word to dismiss what he had seen.

The stranger would not give them his name. 'Go to Bhishma,' he said, 'and describe me to him. He will know me.' They ran the whole way back into the city, through the gates and the courtyards, arriving breathless before Bhishma, the grandsire who had raised their fathers and now watched over them, talking over one another in their haste to tell it right. A ball in a well. A ring thrown after it on purpose. Grass turned into a chain by nothing but murmured words and a practiced hand.

Bhishma listened without interrupting, his stillness drawing order out of their tumbling account. He asked them to describe the man again, closely: his bearing, the particular economy of his movements, the mantra spoken low over each blade of grass before it was cast. When Arjuna repeated, as best he could, the shape of the words, Bhishma's expression changed.

He had heard, years before, of a brahmin named Drona, said to have received the whole science of arms from Rama Jamadagnya himself, the last man alive to hold every weapon Parashurama had ever wielded, taught to him complete in the days before the great warrior withdrew from the world. Bhishma had wondered, idly and without expectation, what had become of such a man, whether the years had worn the gift down to nothing in some forgotten village. The description the princes gave him left no real room for doubt.

The name suited what they had seen. No ordinary archer wove grass into a chain down a shaft no arm could reach unless the science behind it was of the oldest and highest kind, and there had been only one house left in the world still holding that science whole.

"Then he does not leave this city as a stranger," Bhishma said, and rose to see to it himself.

Bhishma did not send a servant or a minister to fetch the man from the well road. He went himself, on foot, which was honor enough to startle the household guard who trailed uncertainly after him. He found Drona still near the old well, a poor brahmin who had been living quietly in the house of his wife's brother Kripa, with his wife Kripi and their son Ashwatthama.

Bhishma greeted him with folded hands, as one great man greets another, and told him plainly what he had guessed and what he now asked: that Hastinapura had princes who needed a teacher worthy of what they might become, and that no one else in the world, so far as Bhishma knew, still carried what Drona carried. He asked him to stay, and to teach, and named no limit on what he would be given in return.

Drona did not haggle, and he did not refuse. He thought of his son and of Kripi, and looked at the walls of the city rising beyond the grandsire's shoulder, and he said he would come. Bhishma brought him into the city with every honour and handed his grandsons over to him as pupils, with gifts of wealth, in the proper manner. There was one thing more, and Drona did not say it to Bhishma. He gathered the princes privately at his feet and told them there was a task in his heart that they must promise to perform for him once they were skilled in arms. The Kauravas fell silent. Only Arjuna gave his promise, and Drona embraced him with tears of joy.

The princes had their teacher. What that teaching would one day be worth, none of them yet knew to ask.