转眼之间，阿普（Smaran Ghosal 饰）长大了，然而，生活却并没有因此而变得更加宽容。和父母搬去博纳斯之后没多久，阿普的父亲就永远的离开了他的家庭，就这样，阿普和母亲过起了相依为命的生活。
母亲希望阿普能够成为一名神父，但阿普却并不这么认为，他希望能够就读正规的学校。最终，母亲顺从了阿普的想法。阿普没有让母亲失望，他用出色的成绩和光明的前途向母亲证明了他的用功和努力。阿普得到了念大学的机会，但是，对于他贫困的家庭来说，这个消息既是喜讯，亦是噩耗，为此，阿普和母亲之间发生了激烈的争吵，这一次，在亲情和未来之间，阿普和母亲会做出怎样的选择呢？

A wealthy family from Calcutta is on the last day of their vacation in Darjeeling, a hill station at the foot of Mount Kanchenjungha, t he second highest peak of the Himalayas. Until now, they have been unable to catch a glimpse of the peak Kanchenjungha.The family members are dominated by the father, Indranath (Chhabi Biswas), an industrialist. He wants his daughter to marry a man of his choice and hopes that the man will propose if they are left together alone for some time.
Several long walks and long conversations form the main body of the film. The real-time drama unfolds the daughter's feelings about her father's idea, and the negative reactions to this by her mother and others.
By accident, she meets an outsider, Ashoke, a young student who has refused a job offer from Indranath. Though nothing develops between them, his presence coupled with the setting of mountains and the failure of her sister's marriage, prompt her to reject the proposed suitor.
At the end of his walk, the industrialist arrives at a rendezvous point, expecting to meet his family and the successful suitor. None of them is present to greet him. As the mist clears, the peak of Kanchenjungha is revealed in its full glory. But Indranath is too pre-occupied to admire it.
Kanchenjungha was Ray's first original screenplay and for the first time, he was shooting in color. The film shows about 100 minutes (in real time) in the life of a group of rich Bengalis on vacation.Unlike the usual Ray films, it has a fragmented narrative with no central characters, and no straight narrative in the classical sense.
It is a very structured and composed film that uses color and nature to heighten the drama. Ray told his biographer Andrew Robinson: "The idea was to have the film starting with sunlight. Then clouds coming, then mist rising, and then mist disappearing, the cloud disappearing, and then the sun shining on the snow-peaks. There is an independent progression to Nature itself, and the story reflects this."
As the weather becomes misty - the young daughter and the suitor part at that point, Indranath meets Ashoke, and the elder daughter, Amina and her husband have a bitter moment between them. And then when the sun appears again - Amina's daughter comes back to her parents and they accept her, the misunderstanding is cleared up, and the younger daughter and Ashoke develop a tentative relationship with a hint of future prospects.
The characters and the Nature are interrelated in mood. In his later film Asani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), Ray attempted quite the opposite. While the Nature is shown in its full glory and lushness, in contrast, the characters starve and do inhuman things.
As the characters do not change the clothes during the film (it being depiction of a real time event that happens in 100 odd minutes), the colors of clothes too add a dimension to the characters.
About Kanchenjungha, Ray told in an interview to Cineaste magazine, "(It was) a very personal film. It was a good ten to fifteen years ahead of its time... Kanchenjungha told the story of several groups of characters and it went back and forth. ... It's a very musical form, but it wasn't liked. The reaction was stupid. Even the reviews were not interesting. But, looking back now, I find that it is a very interesting film."

A dawn to dusk account of a young man in search of a job. This is his day of an interview in a swell Indo-British firm where, logically, he has to look his best. His only suit, a complete one, is in the laundry, and as luck would have it, all city laundries are on strike from that morning. The film is an intense search for a new suit to be borrowed from any of his friends, the loss of a good one procured that way, again a frantic search, and finally the interview-all erratic blending of fictional narrative, news reel coverage and near-cinema-verity type documentation. The film ends with a strange interview between the dejected young man and an unseen spectator who has watched him since the film started. And at last the film arrives at a moment of judgment -- that of the value-world.