Page 50 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in Fiction and Film 37

unmarried for life. For a brief, sweet spell, Apu and Aparna live
in his primitive room in Calcutta. He works as a clerk (a job got
for him by Pulu), she keeps house. They are utterly absorbed
in one another. When she leaves him to have their child in her
village, Apu drifts blissfully through his dreary office routine
awaiting the moment of togetherness again. Instead, Aparna
dies, leaving a baby son. Apu is laid waste by grief, contemplates
suicide, and leaves Calcutta.
Wandering by the coast, in the forest and in the mountains,
he renounces his former life, his novel, and Kajal, the son he has
not seen. For five years he disappears until Pulu again tracks
him down – this time working in an isolated mining settlement.
The meeting with Pulu stirs old and poignant memories. Apu
feels driven to make contact with Kajal. Although the boy has
grown up wild and withdrawn and at first distrusts the strange
bearded man who woos him, a tentative bond eventually forms
between them. In a searing finale, Apu sweeps the little boy into
his arms and, united, they set off for Calcutta.
The relationship of the second film to Banerji’s two novels
is much closer than that of the third film to the second novel,
as already remarked. In Aparajito, Banerji’s depiction of the
mother-son conflict took strong hold of Ray’s imagination from
the start, partly because of his own complex relationship with
his widowed mother, who had encouraged his artistic talents but
discouraged him from giving up his safe job in advertising to
become a film-maker after 1950. The Apu–Sarbajaya relationship
‘had some echoes on a purely psychological plane’, said a reticent
Ray. Although he would not lose his own mother until 1960, he
was gripped by what he called a ‘daring and profound revelation’
by Banerji in the novel: ‘For some time after Sarbajaya’s death
Apu became familiar with a strange sensation ... his immediate
reaction had been one of pleasure, like a surge of release ... a
delight in the breaking of bonds ... There was no doubt he loved
his mother, but the news of her death had at first brought him
pleasure – he couldn’t avoid that truth.’ The latter portion of

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