Ganesha Goes to Lunch

A halya and Gautama were childhood friends who loved each other dearly. They played together every day of the year. And because young Gautama was devoted to Vishnu and Lakshmi from an early age, the children would fashion small, shapeless clay statues of the god and goddess, place them in temples of brick and stone, and worship them together. When they grew up, Ahalya and Gautama married, and after a few years moved into the forest outside the city of Mithila to live as rishis, sages, in the lap of nature, which they believed would be more conducive to a spiritual life.

Together the couple built a small hut of mud and thatch by a stream of crystal clear turquoise waters that coursed through white marble boulders upon jewel-like cobblestones. A meadow matted with delicate alpine flowers rolled down to the edge of thick forests of tall oak trees. Rabbits, gazelles, and colorful birds, pheasants, magpies, and sweettongued thrushes all came to eat from Ahalya and Gautama’s hands. Not far away, a serene lake, like a clear eye, reflected everything that came within its ambit. Their life was harmonious, peaceful and idyllic for many years, and would have continued this way had Ahalya’s beauty not complicated and destroyed it.

Over the years Gautama, because of his one-pointed devotion to Vishnu and Lakshmi, became a powerful sage who gained control over his passions. He kept Vishnu and Lakshmi in his heart like a sacred seed of fire, and lived a life of yoga and prayer. Daily he implored, “Vishnu, Lord of the World, Lakshmi, Mother, Energy of the World, come, come into our home and our hearts!” And though Ahalya joined him in the prayer, offering flowers, lighting the incense, and ringing the bell, many times her attention lay somewhere else. A dark desire stirred in her depths and in her dreams like behemoths beneath the sea.

Every morning Ahalya would set out to bathe in the still lake behind their cottage. There she would be reminded as she sat on the banks and gazed at her own reflection, of how lovely she was. Brahma himself had created her in a moment of erotic passion. Her long, dark hair fell in waves about her face, framing exquisitely chiseled features: liquid, languid eyes, a mouth full and sensuous beneath a perfectly proportioned nose. Her body, too, in her deerskin and tree bark, was beautifully proportioned, from the tips of her hair to the ends of her toes.

During these moments Ahalya would reflect, “I am fit for the gods. I am wasting away in the forest. Even Gautama, whom I love dearly, is as a brother to me now, and has eyes only for nature’s beauty, which reminds him of the beauty of his gods. His blood has turned to sap. I wish for someone more passionate than he, someone with more heat in his veins than my husband has.”

After having fulfilled his household duties, Gautama wished only to retreat within himself and explore the universe there. While Ahalya, too, had a strong spiritual side, she possessed equally intense carnal longing and ambitions. At times she was full of a deep content, but at times she grew weary of wisdom, and the clarity of her vision was clouded by the sediment of her ego, especially on those days when Gautama preoccupied himself with other holy matters and could not give her the attention she craved. In these moments, Ahalya would sit at the lake’s edge and visualize the kind of man who would come to make love to her: how he would look, and look at her; the way he would approach, and touch her.

The formless plasma of the universe began to take shape into a body that would fulfill her desires. And he in whose loins the desire found its echo was none other than the god, Indra. Someone on earth was calling to him, and he had to go. He looked down from his clouds, saw Ahalya, and was immediately inflamed by passion.

Late one afternoon while Gautama was out collecting roots and tubers for their dinner, chopping wood, bathing, and supplicating Vishnu and Lakshmi with the offerings of freshly plucked flowers to visit their home and hearts, Indra took a sip of soma, assumed the form of Gautama, and swaggered his way to the couple’s cottage.

Ahalya’s body quickened at the sight of his approaching form. In his clean, crisp dhoti, his moustache and beard trimmed and recently washed, he looked effulgent in the last rays of the setting sun. Her insight revealed to her at once that this was not Gautama, but Indra in disguise.

As Indra came to the door, an image formed from her dreams, any qualms she may have had melted away in her knowledge of who this was. What a lineage! What beauty! What power! What fame! This was no ordinary mortal, but a god!

Her emotions blazed as Ahalya looked into her lover’s eyes. Because he came in a familiar form, because Ahalya had been made ready by her longing for just this moment, because the desire was longstanding, and now mutual, there was no hiatus between their seeing each other and their meeting. In a conflagration of arousal, they explored and touched and consummated their passion, again and again. The clandestine and illicit circumstance of their sexuality added to their ardor.

“Go,” Ahalya would whisper in Indra’s ear. “Go now, hurry!” But no sooner would he move away than their inflamed fervor drew them together again and they lost themselves in their ecstasy.

By and by, as the sun began to set, Gautama returned from his evening prayers with flowers in his hands. He opened the cottage door and stood in shock at the sight of his half-naked wife in the embrace of another, who looked just like him. It didn’t take him long to know who this was, and what had happened.

“You, who call yourself a god, but have no control over your impulses, may you grow a thousand phalluses all over your body so everyone may see the true face of your concupiscence!”

Right there and then a thousand penises thrust out of Indra’s pores. Everywhere, upon his face and ears and head, neck and chest and arms, hands and legs and feet dangled pudenda that left him a hideous sexual monster. Indra scurried away in shame, to hide his gross and comical body.

God or no, Indra’s indiscretions would not be easily dismissed. Brahma saw to that. For a thousand years Indra would be forced to do penance and reflect upon his uncontrollable and immoral appetites. Over those centuries, Indra resolved to control himself in the future, so Brahma took pity on him, transforming his many penises into eyes. Instead of indulging in pleasures, for the next thousand years he watched the drama of life. But because he was immortal and ever youthful, his passions returned, and he began his pendulum swing between abstinence and indulgence all over again.

In the meantime, on earth, Gautama turned to Ahalya, his heart burning in agony, and said,“And you, wife—and yet no wife, for you have betrayed the basic trust of our marriage—may your burning in unholy desire for another incinerate you to ash! ”

Ahalya had no time even to plead with her husband. Flames rose around her, licking her beautiful body with tongues of fire, her tender toes and tight thighs, flat belly and firm breasts, long neck, luscious lips, pert nose, long eyelashes, and lustrous hair—all afire, and soon charred and consumed to ash.

As Gautama stood, watching his wife’s transformation, he felt his own heart turn to cinders at the sight before him. For in loving someone, one becomes the other, and whatever one does to the other, one does to oneself.

In a fit of compassion for himself and Ahalya, he amended his curse: “Thousands of years from now, Vishnu and Lakshmi shall come in their incarnation of Rama and Sita, and when their holy feet touch your remains, Ahalya, you will be forgiven and become whole again.”

Turning his back on the pile that had been his wife, Gautama shut the cottage door, and wandered out into the world. The wild flowers and grasses in the surrounding meadows wilted, the leaves on the trees and the bushes turned yellow and fell, the stream’s waters dwindled and stopped flowing, the birds with their varied colored plumage flew off into the silent forest.

Inside their hut for the next thousand years, Ahalya lay in darkness. Though her body was a pile of ashes, consciousness remained in it, like a spark. She remained excruciatingly aware of her condition, with every memory intact. For a millennium she lived without her senses and her appetites. There was time enough now for regret, shame, guilt, remorse, and fury. Ahalya cursed her fate, her desire, Indra, and Gautama. She blamed Brahma for giving her beauty and desires and then punishing her for fulfilling them. She hoped for the arrival of her saviors, Rama and Sita, but doubted they existed—or if they did, that they would rescue a transgressor such as she. Ahalya also longed deeply for her companion and friend, Gautama, who never came.

After her rage spent itself, Ahalya took stock of her life. She was a pile of pulverized particulate matter on the floor of a dilapidated hut. She asked herself, “how did I get here?” The answer made her aware of her own responsibility for her present situation. She had caused her own tragedy. This admission was the beginning of her transformation back to humanness. It did, however, take another thousand years, a concatenation of other insights, and help from the deities of the universe to re-achieve it.

Ahalya determined, instead of suffering unconsciously as she had been doing, to accept her ordeal willingly, and embrace the sorrows that she had brought upon herself. So for another thousand years she burnt in the purgatorial fires that cleanse and heal.

And when she was ready, her ashes received another blessed thought: if the seeds of her carnal desires had germinated when she watered them with her attention, her spiritual desires too would bear fruit if she nurtured them with focus and longing. And a long forgotten prayer arose from the depths of her heart: “Vishnu and Lakshmi, come! Come! Come into my home and my heart! ”

And as Ahalya’s days wore on, now with hope and anticipation, chinks appeared in the windows and doors of the cottage, through which rays of light streamed onto the ground where she lay.

So it was that one day, weary from their wanderings in their exile, Rama and Sita came upon Ahalya and Gautama’s cottage. “Oh, what a beautiful cottage!” Sita said, flinging open the door and entering. “Yes, we could live here for a while.” And as Sita and Rama stepped into the hut, the dust from their feet mingled with Ahalya’s ashes, and like a flame appearing suddenly from smoke, behold, the ashes became a woman again—new, shining, and pure!

Ahalya fell at Rama and Sita’s feet, tears streaming from her eyes. She took the dust from their feet and put it in the parting of her own hair, saying, “Keep me always in touch with the dust of your feet, my Lord and Lady.”

Then Rama lifted her up, and to Ahalya’s amazement, both deities bent down and touched her feet in return, saying, “We bow to the suffering that brings God into our homes and hearts. May there always be shelter for us in the hearts of devotees cleansed through suffering.”

Ahalya looked over Sita’s shoulder, and there, framed in the doorway, stood Gautama, her companion, her mate, her soul—he who had prayed for thousands of years for Vishnu and Lakshmi to come and redeem his wife, so they might be reunited. Ahalya’s heart was full to overflowing with gratitude and hope.

In his hand Gautama held a freshly made broom. Sita took it from him, and began to sweep the dirt floor. She scooped up the ashes, the compost of Ahalya’s suffering, and in her cupped hands, carried them outside and scattered them to the winds. As they fell back to the earth in a shower of white and grey flecks, meadow grasses sprang to life again, and the wilted flowers raised their tiny crowns and began to bloom. Seeds of trees deep in the ground stirred, germinated, and grew, bringing forth blossom and fruit. The rabbits, gazelles, vibrant birds, and other creatures returned, gamboling and drinking from the stream that flowed again with its exultant gurgling. And when Ahalya looked at her cottage, its rustic beauty and coziness were restored as well. The kitchen shone with clean utensils, the floors were covered with mats of reeds, the beds with soft furs.

And there they lived—all four of them—humans and their godlike hosts together, until a year later when it was time for Rama and Sita to move on. But even then the four were never more separated, for Rama and Sita dwelt forever like divine sparks in Ahalya and Gautama’s hearts as they lived out the rest of their lives in contentment, worship, and praise.