And there is, present in this film, as in the shot I have selected from it, the trope, the behaviourable motif, or whatever one cares to call it, that has above all others remained with me from a lifetime of viewing Satyajit Ray's work: I mean the amazing absense in his films of meaningful ambulation. Ray's characters, his male characters mostly but by no means exclusively, are so very horizontal! Horizontal from the heat, to be sure, as from the tetchy, fly-ridden ennervation that it enduces, but horizontal, too, as if in their very souls. They seldom walk. They never run. Ray almost always portrays them limp and languorous on a couch, fanning themselves if no servant can be mustered to fan them.
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