The Wife Turned to Stone

The sages told the Pandavas of Ahalya, the wife of the sage Gautama, who fell through a god's deception and lay for ages under a curse, and was redeemed at last by the touch of the Lord - a tale of the cost of a lapse, and of the grace that redeems even the fallen.

Ahalya was a woman of surpassing beauty, fashioned, it was said, as the most perfect and lovely of all women. She was given in marriage to the great sage Gautama, an ascetic of immense penance and power, and she lived with him in his forest hermitage as his devoted wife. Her beauty was famous through all the worlds - so famous that it troubled even the heaven of the gods, for Indra, the king of the gods, conceived a desire for her that he could not master.