Page 47 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

34 The Apu Trilogy

Aparajito: Apu

We shall see how Ray solved some of the problems in practice in
the next chapter on the making of the film.
Whilst Pather Panchali (in Ray’s version) never leaves the vil-
lage and its environs, Aparajito is a film that is constantly on
the move as Apu grows up and becomes restless for new expe-
rience. It opens in Benares in 1920 with the ten-year-old Apu
freely wandering the bathing ghats, narrow lanes and Hindu
temples of the sacred city. A welter of new impressions play
upon his receptive young mind: the daily rhythm of ablutions
in the Ganges at the ghats; the contrasting styles of the vari-
ous priests who sit there reciting – some earthy, others spiritual
like his father; a muscleman swinging a club who offers him a
go; pigeons, cows and monkeys everywhere; festival firework
displays and sparklers to hold. He also encounters his family’s
upstairs neighbour Nanda Babu, a sluggardly bachelor who
feels obliged to tell the angelic Apu that the liquor bottles in
his room are medicine prescribed by his doctor. A little later, as

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