The story

Drona was eighty-five years old and white-haired to the ears, and on the fifteenth day he fought, the text says, like a boy of sixteen.

In the last hours of the night he had killed Drupada, the king of Panchala, his boyhood friend and lifelong enemy, and with him Virata, in whose city the Pandavas had hidden in their year of disguise. After sunrise Drona went back to killing Panchalas faster than they could close the gaps.

The Pandavas began to believe he would destroy them all. This man cannot be beaten by fighting, Krishna told Arjuna, not even by Indra. Put dharma aside and find a way to win, or he will kill every one of you. He named the way himself. If Drona heard that Ashvatthama, his son, was dead, Krishna believed he would stop fighting. So someone should tell him so.

Arjuna would not agree to it. The others did. Yudhishthira agreed only with great difficulty.

Bhima did the practical part. There was an elephant in the Pandava army, belonging to Indravarman, king of the Malavas, and its name was Ashvatthama. Bhima killed it with his mace. Then he went up to Drona, ashamed of himself, the text says, and shouted that Ashvatthama was dead. He kept the elephant in his mind while he said it.

Drona's body went slack, like sand under water. But he knew his son's strength, and he suspected a lie. He recovered and fought on harder, using the brahmastra, the weapon of Brahma, on ordinary Panchala soldiers. At that point a company of great seers came to the field, Vishvamitra, Vasishtha, Atri and many others, to lead him away. You are fighting against dharma, they told him. Your time has come. Lay down your weapon. This cruelty does not become a brahmin who knows the Vedas.

Shaken, Drona turned to the one man whose word he trusted. He asked Yudhishthira whether his son was dead. He had believed since Yudhishthira was a child that he would not lie even for the lordship of the three worlds. Krishna pressed Yudhishthira hard. If Drona fights for half a day more, he said, your army is finished. Here an untruth is better than truth, and a man who speaks it to save lives is not stained by it.

The constituted text gives Yudhishthira's answer in a single line. Afraid of the untruth and set on victory, he spoke indistinctly: slain, the elephant. Fuller manuscript versions spell out what that line implies, with the name said aloud and the word for the elephant swallowed. Either way, Drona heard what he had already been told. Until that moment Yudhishthira's chariot had always run four finger-breadths above the ground. When he had spoken, it came down, and its horses touched the earth.

Drona lost heart. His great weapons would not come to his mind, and his arrows ran out. Dhrishtadyumna, Drupada's son, who had been born from the sacrificial fire for the purpose of killing him, pressed in. Bhima leaned against Drona's chariot and spoke to him quietly and harshly. If brahmins like you did not take up arms, he said, the warriors of the world would not be dying. You have killed multitudes for the sake of one son, and that son lies dead. Dharmaraja himself told you so. Why doubt it?

Drona put down his bow. He called out to Karna, to Kripa and to Duryodhana to go on fighting, and he called his son's name. He laid his weapons on the floor of the chariot, gave his protection to all beings, and sat in yogic meditation. Dhrishtadyumna jumped down with his sword drawn, and the whole field cried out in horror.

The epic says Drona had already gone. His spirit left his body as a light, and for a moment the sky seemed to hold two suns. Only five people saw it go: Sanjaya, Arjuna, Kripa, Krishna and Yudhishthira. Dhrishtadyumna took hold of the head of a body with no life left in it and cut it off. All the while Arjuna was running toward him and shouting, bring the teacher alive, do not kill him, and the soldiers were shouting the same. Dhrishtadyumna threw the head in front of the Kaurava army.

Across the field Ashvatthama had learned the truth, and his roar of grief carried into the Pandava camp. Arjuna rounded on his eldest brother. You told the teacher a lie wrapped in the armour of truth, he said, all for a kingdom. He trusted you, and we let him die with his weapons down. Better to die than live with it. Then Dhrishtadyumna spoke. A brahmin who abandoned his own duties and burned men with weapons they could not answer deserved to die by any means. He had been born for exactly this. You killed your own grandsire, he told Arjuna, and you call that dharma. Arjuna looked at him sideways, with tears in his eyes, and said only: shame, shame, shame.

Satyaki could not hold back. He called Dhrishtadyumna a murderer of his teacher who had dragged an old man by the hair. Dhrishtadyumna laughed and asked what could be worse than killing Bhurishravas as he sat with his arm cut off, waiting to die. Satyaki went for him. Bhima, at Krishna's word, caught him round the body and held him, and Sahadeva begged them both to remember who their friends were.

What the fifteenth day establishes is a war in which the winners can no longer agree on what they have done. The teacher is dead by his pupils' contrivance. The one man who never lied has lied by halves. And every argument on the Pandava side now ends by naming the last wrong the other man committed. And it leaves Ashvatthama a grievance that the rest of the war will have to answer.

Who appears, and what it argues

• Drona — The brahmin teacher of both sets of princes, who takes his fee in a king's humiliation and a hunter's thumb, then commands the Kaurava army.
• Yudhishthira — The eldest Pandava, called the king of dharma, who gambles away his brothers, his wife and himself without anyone forcing his hand.
• Krishna — Cousin, envoy and charioteer — the one who shapes the war's course without ever lifting a weapon in it.
• Bhima — The strongest of the brothers, whose two vows in the assembly hall turn a property dispute into something that can only end in bodies.
• Arjuna — The archer the whole war is arranged around, who arrives at its opening unable to lift his bow because of who is standing on the other side.
• Ashvatthama — Drona's son, who outlived the war by one night and used it to walk into the winners' camp and end their line while it slept.
• Theme: The impossible choice
• Theme: Divine counsel

Elsewhere in this parva

• Abhimanyu inside the wheel — A boy who knows how to break into a formation and not how to break out of it is sent in first, and the gap closes behind him
• The race against the sun — Arjuna swears to kill Jayadratha before sunset or enter the fire himself, and the whole Kaurava army spends a day standing in his way
• Ghatotkacha's night — Karna spends the one spear that could kill Arjuna on Bhima's rakshasa son, and Krishna dances on the chariot while the Pandavas weep

Questions to explore

• What exactly did Yudhishthira say to Drona about Ashvatthama, and was it a lie?
• Why did Yudhishthira's chariot touch the ground?
• Was Dhrishtadyumna right to behead Drona after he had laid down his weapons?