Eelam enters the narrative as a maritime landscape of recognition rather than as a place the characters are shown reaching. After a violent night at sea, islands near its shores appear at dawn, and Sundara Chozhar identifies among them the island where he met Mandhakini long before. That glimpse joins a remembered refuge to a present reunion: Eelam’s surrounding waters and islands become the setting through which the past returns, and the horizon toward which the ailing emperor longs to flee with the woman he has found again.

The islands near Eelam

The narrative locates Eelam through the islands visible from a small boat, not through a description of cities, political boundaries, or inland life. As the storm clears, Sundara Chozhar recognizes the green islands in the vicinity of Eelam, including the one associated with his earlier meeting with Mandhakini. The text therefore gives the region a distinctly coastal and archipelagic presence: it is approached by water and first becomes recognizable as a line of islands against the morning sky.

The island recalled by Sundara Chozhar is linked to Boodha Theevu, which had once seemed transformed by Mandhakini’s company. His memory makes the island more than a point on a route. It holds the impression of a brief, intensely cherished past, when an otherwise ordinary place became, in his recollection, a paradise. Eelam’s narrative significance thus rests partly in this personal geography: its islands are marked by the emotional history attached to them, especially by the encounter that Sundara Chozhar remembers as belonging to another lifetime.

From storm to recognition

The approach to the islands follows a sudden reversal in the sea. Darkness falls, a furious gale rises, and waves toss the boat violently; the wind tears the sails from its masts. The craft nevertheless rights itself instead of capsizing. Sundara Chozhar attributes its survival to Poonguzhali’s exceptional rowing, whose exertion carries them through conditions that have stripped the boat of its sails. The episode presents the sea around Eelam as a force that can make arrival uncertain, even as human skill keeps the voyage from ending in disaster.

The gale subsides as abruptly as it began. Choppy water settles, dawn brightens in the east, and the rising sun turns the sea to molten gold. The islands then come into view, their coconut groves and abundant birds giving the newly visible landscape a vivid, living character. This calm does not simply follow the storm as a change in weather: it makes recognition possible. Against the returning stillness and light, Sundara Chozhar can identify the islands and connect the present voyage to his distant past with Mandhakini.

That recognition changes the meaning of the boat’s arrival. Sundara Chozhar initially addresses the woman beside him as Poonguzhali, thanking her for carrying him toward what he calls paradise. Turning to her, he discovers that Mandhakini, not Poonguzhali, is there. She appears as she had thirty years earlier, and he understands that she had been disguised as Poonguzhali. Eelam’s island setting is consequently bound to a second discovery: the familiar landscape and the familiar beloved seem to return together, though the reunion takes place after long separation and amid Sundara Chozhar’s physical decline.

Memory, reunion, and escape

For Sundara Chozhar, the islands near Eelam bring the earlier meeting with Mandhakini into the present. His response is not a detached recollection of where they once met; it is an immediate emotional recognition that makes the old island seem close again. The narrative sets the remembered paradise against the present signs of age and illness. The island and its past retain their radiance for him even as he recognizes his own weakness and cannot rise from the boat to approach Mandhakini.

He asks Mandhakini to come to him because his legs no longer allow him to stand, and declares that he does not wish to leave her side. The nearby islands, however, are not simply a destination reached in the scene. He imagines that someone would repeatedly interrupt their idyll if they went ashore, and urges instead that they row out beyond the seven seas toward an isolated island at the edge of the world. This proposed escape remains his wish, not a reported voyage or established outcome. The distinction gives Eelam two related roles: the actual islands bring the lovers’ history back into view, while the imagined journey beyond them expresses Sundara Chozhar’s desire to withdraw from interruption and remain with Mandhakini.

Narrative significance

Eelam’s importance in these passages is intimate rather than administrative. The narrative does not develop the region through its rulers or institutions; it makes its nearby islands legible through a remembered meeting, the strain of a storm crossing, and the recognition that follows. The sea first threatens to overwhelm the boat, then settles sufficiently for the landscape to disclose itself. That movement from danger to recognition gives the setting a clear part in the reunion without suggesting that the characters have landed or completed their journey.

The location also gathers several different measures of time. The dawn landscape belongs to the present voyage, but Sundara Chozhar sees through it to the island of an encounter from long ago. His description of a former paradise and his longing to row beyond the known islands place remembered happiness and desired escape beside the immediate limitations of his frail body. Eelam’s surrounding waters therefore provide both a recognizable geography and a boundary between what has returned—the sight of Mandhakini and the memory of their past—and the freedom Sundara Chozhar can only imagine.