Searching For Satyajit Ray's Iconic Room

I was in Calcutta to find a specific room among its millions and millions of rooms; a room that touched down in America in my early twenties via the magical Silk Road of cinema.

- Robert Hirschfield

I’d previously seen the first two films of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. They gave me my first glimpses of India: the hot, dusty villages of Bengal, the ghats of Benares, and of course Calcutta, the big city of the young writer Apu and his dingy room with its torn curtain that let in the monsoon rains. For years, I visited that room every summer at the Thalia, the art movie theatre on West 95th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, my home away from home.

Apu’s room, in Apu’s Sansaar: The World of Apu was my birthing room as a writer. How was this possible as a New Yorker? The books I read as a young man and internalized ranged from Bernards Malamud’s The Assistant to Franz Kafka’s The Trial. What made me, an alienated urban Jew in the tradition of Kafka, fail to glom onto one of his sinister courtrooms tucked away in rundown residential areas of an unnamed European city where it had no business being?

Why hadn’t I chosen one of those rooms instead?

In my mind, two answers to that question rub against each other.