Page 115 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

102 The Apu Trilogy

attends a village jatra (theatre) performance and is entranced by
the actors; at home he dresses up as a prince using Durga’s pre-
cious tinsel without her permission; they fight and are broken up
by Sarbajaya; Durga runs off into the fields in search of the fam-
ily cow, chased by Apu; meanwhile Indir, seriously ill, returns to
the house but is ruthlessly rejected by Sarbajaya; wandering in
the fields, Apu and Durga see a railway train; on their way back
with the cow they find Indir on the point of death; Indir’s body
is taken away for cremation.
To the eyes of the viewer, or at least the western viewer who
does not follow the language and the mythological story of the
villainous Serpent King, his daughter and her noble husband,
the pantomime histrionics of the theatre troupe are delightfully
incongruous, if a shade too lengthy. But to the enthralled eyes
of Apu, standing in the front row of the audience, they appear
as real as the dramas of his own life, enacted in the ‘playhouse’
of his school, at home and among the neighbours. In Banerji’s
novel, Apu befriends one of the impoverished boy actors play-
ing a prince and brings him home, where the two of them sing
together. In the film, Apu, alone, makes himself a tinsel crown
and a stage moustache (which he fails to attach to his upper lip).
Either way, the scene is an intimation to us of Apu’s power of
imagination, which in years to come will lead to his desire to
become a novelist, in The World of Apu.
With Durga, however, in the scenes that follow, Apu is still
very much the callow younger brother to her knowledgeable
elder sister. She is big enough to catch him and slap him for
his theft of her tinsel, leaving him with eyes full of tears and
reproach and her stinging rebuke: ‘Ass! All dressed up like a
prince!’ (She understands, as Apu does not yet, that they are
paupers who will never be princes.) She can run faster than him
through the fields. She knows how to chew sugarcane properly.
Her alert ears and eyes spot the monstrous steam train, puffing
black smoke, before his do. Yet there are many things that nei-
ther child yet grasps, for example, where the train is going and

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Robinson_Ch05.indd 102 9/16/2010 9:08:38 PM