Page 126 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Aparajito: Critique 113

The parents have a conversation, partly about their absent son,
which prepares us for the enchanting entry of Apu, now played
by a new boy, Pinaki Sen Gupta, rather than Subir Banerji of
the first film. Like Apu’s playful first appearance as an eye in
the hole of a blanket in Pather Panchali, Apu in Aparajito is first
seen only in part: as a sensitive little face peering around the
corner of a wall painted with a dog. Behind the corner of another
wall decorated with a rabbit, another boy is hiding. Apu and a
group of friends are chasing each other through the lanes, nooks
and corners in the area around his house. Often there is so little
space to move that the boys have to squeeze past obstacles – first
one boy, then another, is seen ducking under the stomach of a
ruminating cow.
It is Apu who now personalises the ghats for us after the,
as it were, pigeon’s-eye view in the film’s opening sequence.
Alone (unlike in the novel), he wanders by the riverside with a
small paper windmill in his hands, observing a particular ghat’s
goings-on curiously without fully understanding what he sees.
First, he gazes at his father seated on some steps surrounded by
women, mainly widows in white, as Harihar serenely interprets
religious texts from the Sanskrit into Bengali in front of a col-
lection plate with some coins in it. Then he skips away along
the ghat, the sound of his father’s declamation fading away on
the soundtrack, until he reaches the next kathak who – like a
tour guide in a cathedral – has his group of devoted listeners.
Apu is not interested, but the film pauses to give us time to
absorb the second reciter’s very different, melodramatic, ‘masala’
story-telling (about the love of Radha and Krishna): as different
from Harihar’s reading as Bollywood films are from Ray films.
Meanwhile, Apu, still clutching his windmill, has climbed onto
the deck of an empty moored boat. From there he spots some-
thing interesting further along the ghat and runs towards it. On
one of the many platforms by the river’s edge there is an alfresco
gymnasium. A muscular man is exercising with a heavy club. In
a friendly way he offers Apu a go, but the small boy shyly refuses.

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