Ahalya and the Long Wait

Rama and his brother Lakshmana were walking to Mithila with the sage Vishvamitra. They were still boys, with bows on their shoulders. When the city came in sight they passed a grove close by its walls. There were huts in it, and old trees, and no people at all. It was overgrown and silent.

"Reverend sir," said Rama, "whose place was this? Who lived here long ago?"

"Listen," said Vishvamitra, "and I will tell you whose it was, and how a great man's anger emptied it."

This was his story.

The grove had belonged to the sage Gautama. In those days it was so lovely that the gods themselves honoured it. Gautama lived there with his wife Ahalya, and the two of them kept their vows together for thousands of years.

One day Gautama went down to the river to bathe. While he was gone Indra, the king of the gods, came to the hut. He had seen Ahalya's beauty and wanted her for himself, and he came wearing the shape of her husband.

Ahalya was not deceived. She knew who stood in front of her in the sage's form. But it was the king of heaven who had come to her door, and she did not send him away.

Afterwards she was afraid.

"Go now, lord of the gods," she whispered. "Go quickly. Save yourself and me from Gautama."

Indra hurried out of the hut. He was too late. Gautama was coming up the path from the river, bright as a fire from his bath, with the firewood and sacred grass for his rites in his hands. He saw his own shape walking towards him, and he understood all of it.

"You took my form to do this wrong," he said. "For that, lose your strength."

The curse struck at once, and Indra's power went out of him.

Then Gautama turned to his wife.

"You will stay here," he said. "For years past counting you will lie on ashes and live on air. No eye will see you. When Rama, the son of Dasharatha, comes into this wood, receive him as a guest. That will make you clean, and you will come back to me in your own form."

He left the grove and went away to the peaks of the Himalaya.

"Come," said Vishvamitra. "Go in."

Rama and Lakshmana went into the grove behind him, and there they saw her. Until that moment she had been hidden from gods and men alike. Her long vow had filled her with light. She was like a flame wrapped in smoke, or the full moon seen through winter mist.

The two princes bent and touched her feet.

Ahalya remembered what Gautama had said. She welcomed them, brought water for their feet and gave them all that is owed to a guest, and Rama accepted it.

Flowers fell from the sky. There was music overhead, and the gods called out, "Well done!"

Gautama knew, far away, that the hour had come. He returned to the grove and honoured Rama. Then he took Ahalya to his side, and the two of them went back to their vows together.

Rama walked on to Mithila.

The poet Kamban told the Ramayana again in Tamil, some eight hundred years ago. He tells this part the other way round. The wonder comes first, and the story after.

Rama, Lakshmana and Vishvamitra came to Mithila of the many towers and stood outside the fortress. Flags flew on every tower. There, high on an open field, stood a black rock.

Rama's eyes fell on it. As he walked, the dust of his feet drifted across it.

The rock stirred like someone coming out of a faint. Then it was no longer a rock. A woman stood there, in the form she had long ago, with her head bowed.

Rama turned to the sage.

"Listen," said Vishvamitra.

Indra had wanted Ahalya, the wife of Gautama, for a long time, and he waited for the sage to be away. One day he found a way to draw Gautama off. Then he slipped into the hermitage wearing the sage's exact body.

She came to know who he was. Even so, she could not make herself send him away.

Gautama did not stay away long. He came back blazing, like Shiva with the third eye open. Ahalya stood where she was, stunned with shame. Indra shook with terror and began to creep off in the likeness of a cat.

The sage needed no bow. His words were his arrows.

He cursed Indra to wear a thousand marks of his shame all over his body, and in the blink of an eye they covered him. Indra left, and the whole world laughed at him.

Then Gautama turned to his wife.

"Be stone," he said.

She fell at once, a rough thing of black rock. But even as she fell she pleaded with him.

"The great know how to forgive a wrong as well as punish it. Put an end to this curse somewhere!"

So he set one. "Rama will come one day, with bees humming about his garlands. Let the dust from his feet touch you, and the stone will let you go."

The gods looked at their king and came down in a body, with Brahma at their head, to beg for him. By then Gautama's anger had cooled. He changed the thousand marks into a thousand eyes.

"That is how it was," said Vishvamitra. "In the forest I saw what your hands can do. Here I have seen what your feet can do."