#khilji

Padmavati’s leopard is meant for the jungles of Singhal, fractious and uneasy in the dry heat of Mewar, and it seems nothing like the the small, unobstructive daemons that the other ladies boast; if a woman’s face ought not be seen by strangers, why should her soul? But Padmavati’s leopard follows loyally at her heels, and whatever else compromise she might make to walk among her husband’s people, this will not be one of them. 

Ratan Sen’s daemon is an elephant, regal and refined. But also near-impossible to accomodate, except in the palace (modified over the generations by ruler after ruler with a similarly inconvenient form). His nobles live in terror that he might invite himself to dinner, requiring a pavilion to house his daemon to be constructed at once, but Ratan himself thinks nothing of this, or the opportunities of which it might deprive him: it is just one more burden, he says humbly, to which he has been born. 

Nagmati’s shrew rides on her shoulder, scorned as ever: but in her father’s house, they smiled to see it and spoke of how shrews were responsible for slaying all sorts of vermin. “Perhaps not much to look at it,” her father would say, “but the promise of a clean kitchen is something no man or woman would do well to remember before they speak careless words.” She remembers those words, and repeats them to herself, whenever her husband’s eyes slide away; she remembers those words, even if no one else will. 

Mehrunissa’s daemon takes the form of an ostrich, wide-eyed and easily ruffled, and that that is why she asks her father for the gift of feathers, why she claps her hands with delight to see a twin of her own dear daemon brought before her. The bird is chained, though, the end held carelessly in Khilji’s fingers, and Mehru, poor Mehru, never stops to think what that image might mean. 

Khilji is ever accompanied by a crocodile: lazy, unhandsome, ever smiling. But when it attacks–oh, when it attacks–it shows no mercy, and its bite cannot be dislodged by any power in the world.