The burning of Kama and Rati's grief are re-enacted, rather than merely retold, in a living festival still kept in parts of South India on the eve of Holi. Known regionally as Kama Dahanam, the burning of Kama, the observance involves the ritual burning of an effigy representing Kamadeva, paralleling the mythic incineration by Shiva's opened third eye, and in some regional forms of the accompanying storytelling and performance, particularly in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Rati's mourning and her successful plea for her husband's continued, bodiless existence are recited or dramatized as the reason the fire is lit at all, the community's bonfire standing in for the fire from Shiva's eye and the occasion serving simultaneously as the mythic origin of Holi's own bonfire, Holika Dahan, in some local traditions, and as a distinct commemoration of desire's near destruction and survival.
Beyond ritual, the pairing of Kama and Rati supplied one of the most productive subjects in classical and medieval Indian sculpture and painting, appearing in temple friezes and courtly miniatures as an idealized loving couple whose intertwined figures modelled erotic sentiment, shringara rasa, as a legitimate aesthetic and devotional category in its own right rather than something requiring embarrassment, a claim about desire's dignity carried in stone and paint as much as in the myth Rati's grief resolves.