CHILDHOOD DAYS: A Memoir, by Satyajit Ray, translated by Bijoya Ray. New Delhi: Penguin Books (India), 174 pp., with b/w photos and pen drawings by Satyajit Ray, Rs 200.

The memoirs of film directors are often confined to early memories. Ingmar Bergman writes of his childhood, Akira Kurosawa gets up to the creation of "Rashomon" and then stops, Jean Renoir writes most warmly of his early days, and Satyajit Ray has a whole volume dedicated to his boyhood.

"Childhood Days" was originally published serially in 1980 and in book form two years later. In it, India's most famous film director remembers his childhood in Calcutta. "I have described some ordinary events and ordinary people," he says, "as well as extraordinary ones. Children do not make a distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, anyway. Adults do."

With simplicity and sincerity, Ray (1921-1992) remembers what it was like to be an Indian child during the last days of the Raj. He records early impressions and a precocious interest in the visual -- he was drawing from an early age and, like Bergman, was enthralled by the magic lantern. (Kurosawa, to the contrary, had real movies in mind from the first -- his brother was "benshi"(commentator) and he got into theaters free.) From there Ray graduated to filmmaking itself. But that is another story, since his memoirs end with his entering high school.

The story is continued in a further memoir, "Making Movies," which was originally published in 1979. An English version appeared earlier and Bijoya Ray's new translation is appended to "Childhood Days" and made a part of the present book.

It begins in 1955 when, after having overcome innumerable difficulties, Ray finally completed his first film, "Pather Panchali." The making of this seminal picture (an award winner at the Cannes Film Festival, which established Ray as a director of international stature) is here remembered through many anecdotes.

Viewers will remember the scene by the railway track where little Apu and his friend Durga have a fight and then stand in a field of flowering grasses and watch the train go by. What the viewer does not know is that after having shot half the sequence Ray and his crew, returning to complete it, found all the flowering grasses were gone. The cows had eaten not only the flowers, but all the grass as well. So the remaining portions of the sequence had to be filmed a year later when the field flowered again.When it became apparent that shooting might take as long as two years, Ray began to worry that the children would grow up so quickly that changes in appearance would become obvious in the film. "Luckily, neither grew as much as they might have."

There was also the matter of the dog. It was to follow Apu about and did so during rehearsals. Came the shot, however, and the dog refused. "The camera was whirring, using up our previous film. A thousand feet of film at that time cost nearly a 150 rupees. In this shot we had already used up film worth at least 10 rupees. But the dog simply glanced at [us] and then looked away, without moving an inch. Cut, Cut, Cut!"

There are other interesting revelations, as well as much of the basic information about filmmaking which is hardest to find. For example, "it usually takes 40 to 45 days to complete a film that runs for two hours. If one is working in a studio, it is possible to get three minutes of shots by working consistently for eight hours. Working outdoors is much more difficult."

This informative, charming, candid, deeply nostalgic memoir, sensitively translated by the late director's widow, joins those few other memoirs by film directors who create in print the effects they achieve on film.