For a time the forest years were gentle. In the woods of Panchavati, Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana made a home of leaves and bark and lived in the rhythm of the ascetics. But the peace was a held breath. Across the sea, in the golden city of Lanka, the rakshasa emperor Ravana had been told of Sita's beauty by his vengeful sister Shurpanakha, whom Lakshmana had earlier disfigured for her unwelcome advances. Ravana resolved to possess Sita — and, unable to face Rama in open combat, he chose deceit.

He turned to Maricha, a demon who had already felt Rama's arrows and feared him. Against his own counsel — Maricha warned Ravana that the path led only to ruin — the demon was compelled to take the shape of a marvellous deer, its hide of gold flecked with silver, a creature too lovely to be natural.

The deer wandered near the hermitage, and Sita, enchanted, longed for it. Rama, against Lakshmana's wary instinct, set out to capture it, leaving his brother to guard her. He pursued the creature deep into the trees and at last loosed an arrow. As Maricha fell, he played his master's final card: he cried out in a flawless imitation of Rama's voice, "Ha Sita! Ha Lakshmana!" — a wounded man's plea for rescue.

Sita's heart broke at the sound. She urged Lakshmana to run to his brother. He refused, knowing the voice for a trick — but when Sita, frantic, accused him of secretly desiring his brother's fall, he could bear it no longer. Before leaving he drew a protective line about the hut and begged her not to cross it. This is the famous Lakshmana rekha, the line of safety; tellingly, it does not appear in Valmiki's Sanskrit at all but enters the story through later and regional versions, becoming inseparable from the popular memory of the tale.

Then came Ravana, disguised as a wandering mendicant begging alms. Bound by the duty of hospitality, Sita stepped beyond the line to give him food — and the holy man became the ten-headed king. He seized her, mounted his aerial chariot, and bore her screaming into the sky. The aged vulture-king Jatayu flung himself against Ravana to save her and was struck down, dying only after he had seen the direction of her flight. Sita, with desperate presence of mind, loosed her ornaments to earth as she was carried south — a trail of grief laid down for the husband who would come searching.