Page 53 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

40 The Apu Trilogy

monkeys. These animals go about the place as if they owned
it. Irresistibly funny, they sometimes go for your bag of pea-
nuts with alarming viciousness. But when they swing from
the bell-ropes and perform an impromptu carillon, the sight
and sound are no longer merely comic.
Rich possibility of a scene here, with Apu.

Other significant changes to the novel in the Benares section
of the film involve human relationships. The young Lila is omit-
ted, as already mentioned. Although Apu is seen with young
male friends, much of the time he wanders the streets and bath-
ing ghats alone, nor does he attend a city school. Ray intensifies
Sarbajaya’s isolation, too, presumably for dramatic purposes. In
the novel, she develops a friendship with a Punjabi woman who
lives upstairs with her family and is present at Harihar’s death-
bed; in the film, the woman is just an acquaintance, and only
Apu witnesses the death. After she becomes a cook, Sarbajaya
decides to leave the household because someone unjustly canes
Apu as a punishment; in the film, her decision is provoked purely
by her catching sight of her cherished son preparing a tobacco
pipe for the household, like a servant working for his master.
The rest of the second film – set in the village of Sarbajaya’s
aged relative Bhabataran and then in Calcutta – is largely faith-
ful to the novel, in spirit if not in detail. ‘Why did the unknown
hold such attraction for him?’ Sarbajaya asks herself about Apu
in the novel. This gulf in comprehension between mother and
son defines the film too. Apart from the fact that in the film
Apu is not sent away from the village to board at a secondary
school, and that his love is for science rather than the humani-
ties, the other main change from the novel is that Apu has some-
what more money, and experiences less hardship, in the film.
Banerji’s Apu, unlike Ray’s, is often at starvation level while
studying in Calcutta. Perhaps Ray felt that too grim a depiction
of want would unbalance the film and also drive away his audi-
ence, as well as being inconsistent with Banerji’s fundamentally

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