Page 46 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in Fiction and Film 33

student in the early 1940s. He had to invent ways to convey on
screen the all-important atmosphere of Pather Panchali, which is
full of descriptions such as this:

Durga was a big girl now, and her mother would no longer
let her go to parties far from home. She had almost forgotten
what luchis [thin fried bread] tasted like. Until a little while
ago, when the nights were bright with the full moon of
September and the path through the bamboo grove was like a
thread woven of light and shade, she used to wander all round
the village and come back with her sari full of sweets and
dried, pressed and toasted rice for the Lakshmi festival. At
this time of the year conches were being blown in every house,
and all along the path floated the smell of frying luchis. She

always hoped that somebody in the village would send some
as part of the festival offering. Whatever sweets she brought

back were made to last for two days and her mother had some

too. This year however Sejbou [their shrewish neighbour] had
said to her mother, ‘It isn’t right for a girl of a good family to
wander round from house to house collecting sweets as if she
were a peasant girl. It doesn’t look nice.’ So from then on she
was not allowed to go.

As Ray beautifully depicted the problem in his 1982 Calcutta
lecture,

You had to find out for yourself how to catch the hushed still-
ness of dusk in a Bengali village, when the wind drops and
turns the ponds into sheets of glass, dappled by the leaves of
saluk and sapla, and the smoke from ovens settles in wispy
trails over the landscape, and the plaintive blows on conch-
shells from homes far and near are joined by the chorus of
crickets, which rises as the light falls, until all one sees are
the stars in the sky, and the stars that blink and swirl in the
thickets.

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