Page 113 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

100 The Apu Trilogy

the first time. He lets slip the sound of a grimace. Durga slaps
him lightly: ‘Idiot! Mother will hear you.’ After this brother and
sister share their delicious secret in silence, in several shining
close-ups. But suddenly Durga is on to something new; her alert
hearing has caught the faint tinkle of bells. The sweet-seller has
arrived! Obviously she knows him from past visits. Tamarind
paste and parents forgotten, the two children jump up and go to
a gap in the wall of their house. Outside, the jovial sweet-seller
pauses enquiringly. Durga sends Apu running off to beg money
from their father who is an easier touch than their mother. But
Sarbajaya, still in the kitchen, detects what is going on and calls
out to the indulgent Harihar not to give any coins.
Disappointed, the children run out after the sweet-seller; they
know he is heading for their neighbour Sejbou’s house. A village
dog trots out after them, sensing food. As the small procession
passes along, it is reflected upside down in the waters of a village
pond lightly ruffled by a breeze. The plonking, rustic sound of
the one-stringed ektara, accompanied by sitar, imparts a perfect
rhythm to the odd little group: the wobbling sweet-seller yoked
to his swaying, bobbing pots, hungrily pursued by the children
and their canine companion. This brief wordless interlude of lyr-
ical happiness belongs uniquely to the cinema; it is the kind of
peak in Ray’s work that prompted Kurosawa to conclude: ‘Not to
have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without
seeing the sun or the moon.’
In these few scenes, Ray conveys to us the inter-relationships of
Harihar’s family members with pinpoint clarity. Simultaneously,
we come to feel how each parent sees Apu and Durga, how each
child sees their mother and father and each other, and how Ray
sees them all. Pather Panchali is a film about unsophisticated
people shot through with sophistication, and without a trace of
condescension or inflated sentiment.
Later in the film, there is an especially rich sequence of con-
trasting incidents of a variety that gives Pather Panchali its uni-
versal reputation for vivacity and charm. In barest outline, Apu

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