Memory Game Scene In Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri Has A Chilling Real-Life Echo 

As the 4K restoration of the 1970 classic, Sharmila Tagore-starrer 'Aranyer Din Ratri' gets screened at Cannes 2025, here is a look back at a forgotten detail from one scene 

Over five decades after its release, Satyajit Ray’s 'Aranyer Din Ratri' (Days and Nights in the Forest) returned to global spotlight with its 4K restoration screened at the Cannes Film Festival 2025. Hailed as one of Ray’s most psychologically layered films, it continues to provoke both admiration and introspection. But one scene, long celebrated for its quiet brilliance, reveals a strangely unsettling connection with real life.

We are talking about the scene featuring a memory game — a deceptively simple parlour game played by the film’s central characters during their forest holiday. The sequence has the participants repeating a growing list of names — real or fictional figures— with perfect recall maintaining the order, adding a new one each turn.

What unfolds is a riveting sequence of cultural name-dropping, awkward pauses, social friction, and unspoken tension. The names chosen — often cultural icons, political leaders, film stars, and literary figures — serve as unconscious indicators of each character’s psyche, worldview, and cultural baggage. 

But here’s the strange part: the order in which the characters are eliminated from the game eerily mirrors the real-life deaths of the actors who played them.

ALSO READ: Sharmila Tagore Recalls Harsh Conditions During Aranyer Din Ratri: ‘I Had A Chowkidar’s Room, Simi Had A Bungalow'

Aranyer Din Ratri Plot

The film, which got a standing ovation at Cannes, is about four urban male friends from Calcutta who visit the forests of Palamau for a holiday. There, they encounter a contrasting world — rural landscapes inhabited by tribals and a genteel, upper-class family comprising a widower, his daughter Aparna (played by Sharmila Tagore), and daughter-in-law Jaya (Kaberi Bose).

Let’s go back to the memory back scene. As the four friends and the two women start the game, the first to be eliminated was Kaberi Bose. Rabi Ghosh (Shekhar) was next, followed by Samit Bhanja (Hari), who gives up, and then Subhendu Chatterjee (Sanjeev). Soumitra Chattopadhyay (Ashim) and Sharmila Tagore (Aparna) were the last two standing. Aparna comes across as the most confident among all of them, and looks set to win against a shaky Asim, but surprisingly concedes the game voluntarily. It is later revealed through Aparna's admission to Ashim that she actually remembered all the names perfectly, but chose to let him win. 

Now consider this:

Kaberi Bose, the first to be out, passed away in February 1977. Rabi Ghosh died in February 1997, Samit Bhanja in July 2003, Subhendu Chatterjee in July 2007, and Soumitra Chattopadhyay in November 2020. Sharmila Tagore, the winner in everyone's eyes who bows out in the scene, remains the only one alive today.

It's a pattern no script could have predicted. Surely a mere coincidence, but in the context of a film that wrestles with themes of time, mortality, memory, and the illusions of civility, the parallel feels oddly poignant. Especially because the memory game scene itself is a masterclass in subtext. Each name dropped a reflection of ego, desire, repression, and the social hierarchies the characters carry with them. In fact, the names become a catalogue of the fragmented identity of post-colonial India, mixing East and West, high culture and pop culture.

As Aranyer Din Ratri re-enters the cultural conversation through its Cannes screening, it’s worth revisiting this haunting sequence for the strangely prophetic echo it carries.

ALSO READ: Sharmila Tagore Beams With Joy As Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri Earns Standing Ovation At Cannes

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