Page 130 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Aparajito: Critique 117

creatures, not so much because it is in the way, but out of a casual
cruelty typical of its owner. That is all. In a sense, nothing of any
significance has happened, and yet Sarbajaya’s defencelessness
has been crystallised; we now expect the worst. Again Nanda
Babu appears behind the barred window, but this time no one is
there, except for the prone motionless figure of Harihar.
Ray’s handling of what happens next – Nanda Babu’s pass at
Sarbajaya – is charged with meaning for an Indian. She is in the
kitchen where outsiders do not normally go and where contact
with others while cooking is taboo. As she hears the sound of
the pumps approaching she draws her sari over her head in a
timeless gesture of Indian womanhood. His face unseen, Nanda
Babu slips off his pumps, crosses the threshold, and takes a few
steps, his fingers splayed out and trembling with sexual excite-
ment. ‘Bouthan,’ he says in a low voice, ‘are you making pan?’ –
the spicy betel-nut preparation whose connotations range from
the devotional to the frankly disreputable, but which are always
associated with intimacy. ‘It is a nucleus for hospitality,’ wrote E.
M. Forster in his celebration ‘Pan’, ‘and much furtive intercourse
takes place under its little shield.’ Sarbajaya, with blind instinct,
threatens Nanda Babu with a kitchen blade, and he beats a hasty
retreat.
From here on, the sequence is unrelievedly bleak. At dawn,
Harihar just manages to get the words ‘Ganges water’ past his
lips, and his wife knows he is almost gone. Apu walks quickly
down to the river’s edge to fetch it and returns in the nick of
time. As Harihar’s soul departs his body, a huge flock of pigeons
takes flight and wheels dramatically against the dawn sky, above
the rooftops of Benares, accompanied by the falling notes of a
flute playing a melody based on raga Jog. It will be heard again
when Sarbajaya herself begins to die, and in The World of Apu
when Apu is mentally dead. Ray recalled that at the Venice
Film Festival, this particular moment in Aparajito brought forth
‘a spontaneous burst of applause’ from the capacity audience.
Besides its obvious religious symbolism – especially appropriate

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