<p>This article examines the role of temporality in shaping female identity in Kavita Kané’s <i>Ahalya’s Awakening</i>. While feminist scholarship on mythological retellings has largely focused on voice, agency, and patriarchal silencing, comparatively little attention has been paid to the temporal structures that regulate identity within epic narratives. In the canonical <i>Ramayana</i>, Ahalya appears only at the moment of moral judgement, and her petrification is typically read as punishment. This study argues that the curse functions not merely as ethical condemnation but as temporal suspension – removing Ahalya from narrative, lived, and psychological time. Drawing upon feminist revisionist theory and narrative theories of temporality, particularly Paul Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity, the article reads petrification as exclusion from experiential duration and awakening as re-entry into time. Kané’s retelling restores Ahalya’s prehistory, interiority, and reflective consciousness, thereby transforming myth from moral closure into temporal recovery. By foregrounding duration rather than judgement, this study demonstrates that patriarchal control in epic narratives operates through the regulation of narrative time. Kané’s revision reconfigures identity not as fixed verdict but as a process sustained through memory, reflection, and temporal continuity.</p>