Page 132 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Aparajito: Critique 119

for an orthodox Hindu like Harihar – the pigeons have a second,
secular connotation: they open the film when Harihar emerges
from the river, they surround him on the ghats, and so it seems
natural and fitting that they should also close the final chapter
of his life. The pigeons are not in the novel, as mentioned earlier.
By choosing to focus on them, Ray, one feels, intended them
to have this ambiguous meaning, which melds both Harihar’s
religious orthodoxy and Ray’s own unorthodoxy in one uplifting
poetic image.
After Harihar’s cremation at the burning ghat in Benares –
its rituals performed by his young son – Sarbajaya becomes a
cook for a rich Bengali household, with Apu in tow, before she
decides to leave the city for the village of her aged relative. This
brief transitional period is handled with a cinematic finesse hard
to do justice to in words. In one sequence, Apu is seen pluck-
ing the grey hairs of the head of the household while the man
reclines dozing in the heat. Dismissively rewarded with a few
coins to spend as he likes, Apu after a moment’s thought dashes
out of the mansion, steps nimbly through the ornate gate, passes
through a local wedding procession accompanied by raucously
exuberant music, buys some peanuts and enters a Hindu tem-
ple full of monkeys, which he happily feeds. As so often with
Ray, nothing has really happened here – and virtually no words
have been spoken – yet a character’s shifting thoughts and
moods have been exquisitely expressed. As the monkeys gam-
bol and swing around the temple, snatch the food from Apu’s
eager hands and ring the temple bells with discordant abandon,
Apu’s curiosity and love of life are yet again impressed upon the
mind of the viewer – in implied contradistinction to the resig-
nation and fatalism of his mother Sarbajaya. In the final shot,
the thought process in her decision to leave Benares is equally
eloquent. Catching sight of Apu through the bars of a window
behaving like a mere servant to the household, as she is coming
down the stairs, she stops and then, pondering deeply, walks
haltingly down the remaining steps, her face coming nearer and

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