Vandhiyathevan’s mysterious escape from Kadambur

Vandhiyathevan’s mysterious escape from Kadambur is presented through Manimekalai’s uncertain recollection of the night she found him inside the palace and tried to protect him. Her account turns a hidden route into a maze of possible assassins, disappearing figures, and doubt: she reports helping him, yet cannot decide whether the final, astonishing sight of his escape was real or the product of her own confusion.

The hidden entrance and Vandhiyathevan’s arrival

Manimekalai tells Nandhini that a mirror had been positioned in front of the secret opening leading to the hunting trophy chamber. When she felt that someone might be watching her from the chamber, she opened the entrance and went inside. She suspected an intruder but found no one there; returning to her room, she listened for sounds from the adjoining space.

The sounds soon became more definite in her account: footsteps and voices, followed by a crash. A small round opening in the door shifted, and a figure tried to pass through it, calling for help. Manimekalai says that the voice and figure seemed familiar, and that when she drew the person into the room and lit the lamp, she recognized Vallavarayan Vandhiyathevan. This encounter is the first firm point in her story, but the route by which he reached the room already makes his presence part of the palace’s larger mystery of concealed access.

She describes an inward conflict between her feelings for him and the need to keep him safe. She had dreamed of him for four months and was deeply moved to see him, but concealed that response behind a show of anger at his entry into the women’s quarters. She challenged him about being pursued and about the earlier accusation that he had stabbed her brother in the back. He denied the stabbing and said he had been fleeing attackers while unarmed. Manimekalai does not claim that she had established the truth of his denial; she reports hearing it while continuing to suspect danger in the adjoining chamber.

The search for pursuers

As Manimekalai spoke with Vandhiyathevan, she listened for activity in the trophy chamber. The confused sounds of people moving and voices led her to consider that his account of pursuing attackers might be true. Her immediate priority, as she tells it, became saving him and identifying those who wanted to kill him. She also wondered whether Idumbankaari was involved, and whether he was Vandhiyathevan’s accomplice or connected to the pursuers.

The secret route posed a separate threat. If it was not truly secret, Nandhini might be endangered because she occupied the adjoining room. Manimekalai feared that her father would kill Vandhiyathevan if he learned the young man was inside the women’s quarters, and chose not to tell him. Instead, she instructed Vandhiyathevan to stay where he was and entered the trophy chamber herself to identify the people there.

She says that five or six men stood in different parts of the chamber, near its walls. Their presence frightened her, but she masked her fear with indignation and was about to demand an explanation when Chandramathi came through another door, calling for her. Manimekalai feared that the maid-companion might find Vandhiyathevan and raise an alarm. She returned to her room and brought Chandramathi inside, only to find that Vandhiyathevan had vanished. The men she had seen were gone as well. Idumbankaari denied that anyone had been in the chamber, while Chandramathi suggested that Manimekalai was imagining the figures. The episode therefore supplies no confirmed identity for the supposed attackers and no settled explanation for either disappearance.

The sight beyond the fort wall

Chandramathi then told Manimekalai that Nandhini and her retinue were approaching the fortress gates and that Manimekalai’s father had summoned her to the welcoming party. Hurrying to answer the summons, Manimekalai crossed two parts of the palace, climbed the stairs, and passed through the upper galleries. On the way, she says, she saw the Vaanar warrior crossing the moon courtyard beside the fort wall. In her account he used a bamboo pole to vault onto the wall and was over it almost immediately.

Manimekalai does not present this sighting as an independently verified conclusion. After the room’s vanished visitors and the disappearance of Vandhiyathevan, she says she cannot tell whether what she saw was true or a product of her panicked, overwrought mind. That uncertainty governs the escape as a whole: she has a clear sequence of discoveries and decisions, but not a reliable explanation of how Vandhiyathevan left, whether the men were ever present, or what she witnessed at the wall.

Retelling and immediate aftermath

The event reaches the reader as Manimekalai’s story to Nandhini, not as an uninterrupted account observed from outside. Nandhini’s questions draw out details, while Manimekalai’s hesitations preserve the gaps in her knowledge instead of resolving them. The changing account moves from a hidden opening to the figure at the door, then to the apparently occupied chamber and the empty wall; every new sighting makes the palace seem less legible rather than more so.

Nandhini listens closely, then falls silent and remembers having seen two shadowy faces among the trees around the fort the previous evening. She also recalls that cavalrymen had been sent after them and wonders whether the unknown figures were captured and might be brought to Kadambur. This recollection makes the possibility of real fugitives more pressing, but it does not identify them with certainty or prove that they were the men Manimekalai claims to have seen. The scene ends with Manimekalai asking Nandhini what she thinks, leaving both the escape and the identity of its pursuers unresolved.