Page 70 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

An Epic in Production 57

bar one assistant, Santi Chatterji (who remained with Ray until
his death), and, among the cast, Chunibala Devi. Things were
run on such a slender shoestring that the production controller
Chowdhury took to sleeping in taxis for lack of an alarm clock;
the taxi-driver simply parked his vehicle on a tramway and woke
up as soon as the first tram of the day appeared!
Shooting was in progress when some of Dutta’s films opened
and failed. There was no money now even to buy lunch.
Chowdhury turned, in desperation, to Ray’s wife Bijoya, who
agreed to pawn some of her jewellery, without consulting her
husband. It realised 1,300 rupees. They had to get the jewel-
lery back later, in exchange for some belonging to Chowdhury’s
sister, so that Bijoya could wear it at a ceremony just before the
birth of her son Sandip in September 1953; neither Bijoya nor
Satyajit wanted his mother to discover what she had done for
the sake of the film. (They later found out that Suprabha Ray
already knew but had kept the secret to herself.)
The nadir of Ray’s hopes was reached in the latter part of 1953
and early 1954. He had shown his 4,000 feet of edited footage
to just about every producer in Bengal, and they had been ‘com-
pletely apathetic’. In several attempts to find producers he had
paid middle men with money raised by selling his art books and
records, without telling even his wife, and had been cheated.
The only bright spot was his absolute conviction that he was
doing something important, certainly in Indian films, and per-
haps internationally too. ‘The rushes told us that. The rushes
told us that the children were behaving marvellously and the old
woman was an absolute stunner. Nobody had ever seen such an
old woman in an Indian film before.’
Ray’s friends at the coffee house and the British managers
at Keymer’s also helped to maintain his morale. He had been
showing them stills as the work progressed, which clearly excited
them. One still – a three-shot of Sarbajaya and Durga getting
Apu ready for school – was selected in early 1954 for Edward
Steichen’s great exhibition The Family of Man. Ray also showed

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