Page 77 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

64 The Apu Trilogy

at sunrise down a village path, to the accompaniment of her own
familiar mournful song.
At five in the morning they were standing ready to shoot.
When Chunibala Devi arrived by taxi Ray plucked up his cour-
age and broke the news to the old lady: ‘Today we will carry
you out on a bier.’ She was not in the least put out. So they
spread a mat on a bamboo bier, covered her with the shawl that
in the story she begs from a neighbour, and fastened everything
securely with rope. There was a rehearsal and the funeral proces-
sion began. The shot complete, the bier was put down and the
ropes untied. But Chunibala did not stir. The production team
looked at each other. What could have happened? They were in
a cold sweat. Suddenly they heard Chunibala’s voice: ‘Is the shot
over? Why didn’t anyone tell me? I’m still lying here dead’!
Another scene involving death was handled with less certainty
by Ray. This is the return of Harihar to find his house ruined
and his daughter dead, followed by Sarbajaya’s breakdown. Her
grief-stricken wail is expressed not by her own voice but by a
stringed instrument, the tarshehnai, playing a passage of high
notes; the startling effect is to intensify Sarbajaya’s grief and to
transform it into something nobler and universal.
This substitution was not in Ray’s mind at the time of shoot-
ing. The day before, he had written for Karuna Banerji a note
about the situation, and on the day itself she recalled that he told
her: ‘Don’t be afraid to distort your face. If it gets distorted, don’t
worry, just be normal, as it comes.’ But in the editing room he
came to feel that the scene required a ‘special, heightened qual-
ity’ not accessible to the naked voice. After adding the music he
considered keeping Karuna’s crying sound too but decided it was
ineffective in combination. He did not tell his actress, though;
when she first saw the film, she jerked forward in surprise at that
point. But although the change disappointed her then, she soon
felt that Ray’s notion was a wonderful one.
A tiny detail from that same sequence gives a good idea of how
definite Ray’s intentions in his first film normally were. When

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