Boodha Theevu is a secluded island refuge whose significance rests less on political power than on the private histories it shelters: Mandhakini’s family exile, her youthful encounter with Sundara Chozhar, and her later rescue of him from a bear. The island’s remembered transformations—from a home made by family conflict to a paradise of brief intimacy, and then to a site of danger and salvation—make it a crucial counterpoint to the public world of the Chozha court.

Island Home and Family Exile

Boodha Theevu is one of the places where Mandhakini’s elder relative, addressed as Periyamma, lives. Sendhan Amudhan asks Poonguzhali whether this woman lives on both Ilankai and Boodha Theevu; Poonguzhali confirms that she stays sometimes on one island and sometimes on the other. Her answer gives the island a place within a wider, mobile pattern of residence rather than presenting it as her sole home.

The island is also tied to a family rupture. Poonguzhali explains that Mandhakini and her sister had quarreled terribly when they were young. Their grandfather then escorted Mandhakini to Boodha Theevu and made the island their home, lavishing affection on her. A prophecy that she would become a queen had made his discovery of her muteness especially painful. The account makes the island both a refuge established by an elder’s care and the destination of an exile imposed after conflict; its shelter does not erase the sorrow that brought Mandhakini there.

That history is conveyed through conversation rather than through a direct description of the island’s daily life. As Sendhan Amudhan and Poonguzhali talk, they search for the older woman, but cannot find her. Poonguzhali concludes that Mandhakini is deliberately hiding from Sendhan Amudhan. Boodha Theevu thus belongs to a network of places in which Mandhakini moves between relatives and islands, while her muteness and chosen concealment shape how others seek her out and understand her.

A Shipwreck and a Remembered Paradise

For Mandhakini, Boodha Theevu is inseparable from her first encounter with Sundara Chozhar. She remembers him as the shipwrecked man who had captivated her innocent heart when she was still a spirited girl, moving freely through the forests. In her recollection, his arrival changed the island’s character: what she had known as an ordinary place became a paradise beyond even the heavens. The transformation is personal rather than material; the account attributes the island’s radiance to the brief intimacy of that time.

Sundara Chozhar later recalls being shipwrecked on an island paradise, isolated from human habitation, where he encountered Mandhakini and felt some affection for her. His recollection confirms the shared island episode while revealing how sharply their memories diverge in the present. What Mandhakini preserves as a golden lifetime, Sundara describes as a remote past whose emotional meaning has altered. He says that the affection he once felt has become hatred and loathing after twenty-five years of suffering and anguish associated with her. His rejection does not undo the island’s earlier importance; it makes the distance between a remembered refuge and a painful present more stark.

Rescue and the Chozha Family’s Debt

Boodha Theevu is also the place where Mandhakini saved Sundara Chozhar from becoming prey to a bear. When this deed is recalled, the rescue is presented not as a private act alone but as part of a larger debt: Mandhakini had also saved the life of his son, Arulmozhi Varman, from drowning in the Kaveri. The island therefore enters the Chozha family’s history through acts of protection that extend beyond Sundara himself.

Sundara Chozhar’s recognition of the rescue does not lead to welcome. When Mandhakini is brought into the palace, he insists that she be sent away and recounts his former encounter with her on the isolated island as evidence of an affection that belongs to a distant past. The contrast gives the island’s associations a divided quality: it preserves the origin of a bond and the memory of a life saved, yet neither memory can secure Mandhakini a place beside him in the present.

Narrative Significance

The island gathers together events that the court’s political histories cannot contain: a family quarrel, the making of a home, a young woman’s first attachment, a shipwreck, and a rescue. Its seclusion gives these private events a setting apart from royal ceremony, but their consequences eventually return to the palace through Mandhakini’s presence and Sundara Chozhar’s reaction to her.

Its meaning is consequently unstable rather than simply idyllic. To Mandhakini, Boodha Theevu retains the emotional brilliance of the brief period when Sundara Chozhar transformed her world; to the older Sundara, the island recalls an encounter that he refuses to let define his present. And for the Chozha family, it is the place associated with a protector whose acts saved both father and son, even as the father denies her welcome. The island’s importance lies in this tension between refuge and exile, remembered paradise and rejected past, and private care and public repudiation.