Mandakini Gives Birth to Twins in Sembiyan Mahadevi’s Garden is a remembered event whose significance lies less in a witnessed birth than in the concealed family history it opens. Aniruddha Brahmaraayar later tells Kundhavai that Mandhakini gave birth to twins in Sembian Maadevi’s royal garden, left them there, and continued to visit them in secret. He never learns their fate from the person who holds that secret, but the account helps connect Mandhakini to Arulmozhi Varman’s childhood rescue and to the concealed royal kinship revealed later in the book.

The account of the birth

The event is recounted retrospectively. After returning from years of study, Aniruddha Brahmaraayar encountered the father of Eesana Siva Battar speaking with Mandhakini in Pazhaiyarai. From him, Aniruddha learned that Mandhakini had stayed for a few days in Sembian Maadevi’s royal garden, where she gave birth to twins and abandoned them. The narrative supplies no scene of the delivery itself, and does not name either child as one of the twins.

The report also describes a pattern that continued after the birth: Mandhakini sometimes returned on a whim to see the children, without anyone knowing. When Aniruddha asked what became of them, his informant refused to answer, saying that their fate was a secret belonging to Sembian Maadevi alone. The birth is therefore presented together with two absences—the children’s identities and the outcome of their lives—rather than as a resolved episode.

Aniruddha’s inference about Arulmozhi

The twins’ unknown fate prompts Aniruddha to reconsider another story about Mandhakini. People had said that the Kaveri River itself saved the young Arulmozhi Varman when he fell into it. Aniruddha suspected instead that Mandhakini had been his rescuer. He later tells Kundhavai that this instinct seemed confirmed when Arulmozhi, after meeting Mandhakini in Eelam, independently said the same.

The birth account does not establish that Arulmozhi was one of the twins, and it does not identify the children. Its importance is more measured: it places Mandhakini among the children’s hidden protectors and gives Aniruddha a reason to question a public explanation of Arulmozhi’s survival. The distinction between what is known and what is inferred remains central to the episode.

Kinship and withheld knowledge

Later, Aditha Karikalan tells Nandhini Devi that she is Sundara Chozhar’s daughter by Mandhakini and therefore his sister. This revelation establishes a royal parent-child relationship, but the account of the twins does not explicitly identify Nandhini Devi as one of them or explain how the birth in Sembian Maadevi’s garden relates to the circumstances Karikalan describes. The book leaves those particulars unstated; Sembian Maadevi’s exclusive knowledge of the twins’ fate underscores how much of the family history remains guarded.

The event thus connects private maternity to dynastic identity without turning the birth into a fully disclosed genealogy. Mandhakini’s visits, the children’s concealment, and the later recognition of Nandhini Devi’s parentage show how a personal history can persist beneath public accounts of royal descent. The episode’s consequence is not a settled family tree but a sharper sense that the identities and loyalties shaping the succession crisis rest partly on truths known only to a few.