Page 108 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Pather Panchali: Critique 95

sometimes separate, sometimes together. Secretly they share
a pickle made with oil stolen from their mother; trail behind
the itinerant sweet-seller whose wares they cannot afford; lis-
ten to Auntie Indir telling them ghost stories at night; marvel
at the peep-show of the ‘bioscopewallah’ displaying images of
faraway places; and huddle together in a monsoon downpour,
as the village seasons change. One day, feeling annoyed with
each other, they run across the fields around the village and
out of their familiar world. There, in the unknown, among the
feathery white kash grasses, they become friends again and have
their first tingling encounter with a railway train belching black
smoke. On their way back home through the forest, leading
the family cow and giggling and tickling each other, they meet
something even more incomprehensible – Death. Indir, their
‘auntie’, rejected by Sarbajaya, has come into the forest to die.
Sometime later, in the monsoon, Durga too dies from a fever
brought on by the rain, during a savage overnight thunderstorm.
Without being told, Apu begins to understand death for him-
self. Harihar is away at the time, trying every possible avenue
to make some money; on his return he is compelled to confront
his full failure as a husband and as a man. He decides to take
Sarbajaya and Apu to Benares, where he will earn a living by
reading aloud the scriptures. The last image in the film is of the
three of them trundling slowly away from Nishchindipur in an
ox cart.
Let us now consider some of the striking sequences from
Pather Panchali, and from the other two films of the trilogy in
the following two chapters, so as to have a clearer picture of Ray’s
mise-en-scène. They have been chosen to reveal, I hope, how Ray
builds up Apu’s world and allows us to enter his thoughts as they
grow in maturity with age and experience.
Apu’s first day at school, early in the film, is a good place to
begin. Banerji, the writer of Pather Panchali, devoted about ten
pages of his novel to the school of the grocer–schoolmaster, for
whom caning is a frequent substitute for teaching. Ray distilled

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