June on song. Picture by Aranya Sen

What would Paresh Chandra Dutta, the middle-aged clerk who stumbles upon a precious stone that makes him rich in Satyajit Ray’s Paras Pathar, do in our times? Sell cocaine perhaps. That’s what he does in Kanchanbabu, debutant film-maker Arijit Biswas’s take on the Ray classic.

“It’s a new-age Parash Pathar,” claims Arijit, who had directed the Doordarshan mega serial Roopkatha.

In Kanchanbabu, Paran Bandopadhyay plays the role immortalised by Tulsi Chakraborty. “Kanchanbabu is a clerk too but his life becomes miserable when he is sacked. His friend Dipankar De helps him solve the problem and Kanchanbabu turns to selling cocaine. Then he meets June, a crooner who changes his life forever. But unlike in Paras Pathar, he falls into bad company and reaches a point of no return,” says Arijit, supervising a shot at The Spring Club.

After a few rehearsals, June is ready to go for the final take of a song sequence at a bar. “My character Trisha is extremely passionate about her music. She is straightforward and gutsy but she is also part of the bad world and she rues the fact that she couldn’t make it big as a singer,” says June, looking eye-catching in a black knee-length dress.

A part of the Rs 40-lakh film has already been shot in Shankarpur and other spots in Calcutta.