Page 149 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

136 The Apu Trilogy

Each of these scenes dissolves magically into the next. As
Renoir remarked, when he saw the film in Paris, intimacy is sug-
gested without showing a single embrace. Finally, after husband
and wife have been out to see a hammy mythological film – in
which the antics of the gods embarrass the sophisticated Apu
but enthral his more traditional wife – the cinema screen segues
into the back window of a horse-drawn carriage, and they are
alone again in their lovers’ world. The intimate understanding
and precise shifts of mood in their conversation inside the cab
can only partially be conveyed by subtitles, but the scene never-
theless remains one of the high points of the film, accompanied
by the same musical transition as after the wedding – from the
esraj playing Apu and Aparna’s theme to the sitar in carefree
mood. When Aparna strikes a match to light the cigarette that
Apu has unthinkingly put in his mouth (forgetting his promise
to his wife to smoke only after meals), he notices that the flame
has brought a strange and wonderful glow to her face. ‘What is
there in your eyes?’ he asks with tenderness. ‘Kohl,’ she answers
mischievously, according to the English subtitle. But in Bengali
she says ‘Kajal’, which is the word for kohl or mascara. It is also
the name of the baby son she will soon bear Apu and who will
cause her death. A vital link of emotion and artistry in the film
is thereby lost on the western viewer, for whom the pun is una-
voidably untranslatable. The double-meaning could be read as
the subtlest of suggestions that Apu, after long rejecting Kajal,
will in the end embrace him. Satyajit Ray is among the most
natural and nuanced writers of dialogue the cinema has pro-
duced, but unfortunately only Bengali-speakers can fully savour
this pleasure.
Apu’s suicide attempt on the railway tracks – which forms no
part of the novel Aparajito – after he receives the stunning news
of Aparna’s death, is powerfully and originally dramatised in the
film. We see the build-up, with Apu lying immobile on his bed,
indifferent to food, books or people. His downstairs neighbour,
a matronly woman, loses no time in advising him that he should

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