Page 52 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in Fiction and Film 39

a suitable girl to play Lila in Aparajito; after two mismatches, his
third actress was abducted from him on the first day of shooting
by her irate fiancé. Reluctantly, Ray wrote Lila out of the script,
which meant, of course, that she was out of the third film too.
‘I’m never sure whether Apu’s attachment to the city without
the element of the girlfriend is strong enough,’ Ray said in the
1980s; ‘the pull that the city exerts is a bit abstract I think, and
yet ... watching Aparajito recently I didn’t feel the absence of Lila
at all.’ His own experience in his formative years may have influ-
enced him here; he never had a girlfriend, and the only girls he
knew well were his various cousins, including Bijoya, whom he
early on decided to marry.
A less radical change to the novel in the second film is its
treatment of Benares and its unique ghats leading down to the
Ganges. The first section of the film is a miraculous evocation
of the city’s atmosphere through the eyes of a newcoming fam-
ily, Apu in particular, conveyed largely without the use of words.
While some of these visual aspects of the city are described in
the novel, most are not. For example, there is not a single sen-
tence referring to the pigeons or monkeys that are such a feature
of life in Benares and of Ray’s film – perhaps because Banerji
took them for granted in the minds of his Bengali readers. The
film’s celebrated scene following the death rattle of Harihar and
the last-minute giving of Ganges water by Apu at the insistence
of Sarbajaya, of a flock of pigeons suddenly taking flight and
wheeling in the dawn sky above Benares, is therefore entirely the
creation of Ray. As is the scene of a curious Apu throwing food
to a crowd of monkeys in a Hindu temple, whilst eagerly observ-
ing the animals’ inimitable cavortings. Ray deliberately wrote
the Benares scenes of the film while staying in Benares and kept
a fascinating diary in which he described these monkeys:

March 4 [1956] – Visited the Durga Temple. People who

come here with the intent of offering a prayer to the deity
usually do so with half a mind, the other half being on the

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