This was all! Sita the patient, faithful, loving wife was never brought forward. The woman’s part was a quite subordinate one and was left to the imagination of the spectators. The conquering Rama was everything; the long-suffering Sita was forgotten on this occasion. However, the gentle wife of Rama has a place of her own in the affectionate regard of the people of her native land and her history is well remembered. I have seen a picture of the car in which Sita was abducted tattooed on the arm of an ignorant woman of the lower classes, and found on inquiry that she knew the old old story well. The Ram Lila I have just described was a particularly good example of the annual celebration. Ordinarily, huge figures, stuffed with straw, represent the demons. Rama and Lakshmana, seated on a stage, are carried about on the shoulders of men and, after traversing the ground, hither and thither, without any apparent object, at length set fire to the effigies, whose combustion concludes the play, if such it can be called; whereupon the crowds assembled to see the sport depart in clouds of dust and smoke. Often several sets of demons and Ramas may be seen on the same field, got up by rival parties, by different sections of a city, or by separate villages. It appears that there is some difficulty in getting boys to personate Rama and his brother on the occasion of the Ram Lila festival, as it is the popular belief that they never live to attain manhood.[48] There is also another, if less superstitious reason for the difficulty in question, and it is this: At the close of the festival Rama and Lakshmana have to feast the Brahmans, and that involves no inconsiderable outlay of money. Hence, in the somewhat lawless border districts on the Indus, it is the usual thing for the sons of well-to-do persons to be actually kidnapped and carried off to play Rama and Lakshmana at the annual festival. For ten days during the feast they are believed to be literally possessed by the god and are worshipped as Vishnu. But the worship of these boys creates, I was told, a curious and interesting difficulty about the selection of Rama and Lakshmana. The two heroes were men of the warrior caste, and so should their modern representatives be, but, as they have divine honours paid to them during the festival, it would not suit the Brahmans to bow down to and touch the feet of youths of inferior caste, while even personating demigods, and so, in defiance of history, _Brahman_ youths are generally selected to represent the _Kshatriya_ heroes in the Ram Lila.