One friend I miss having around is Mario Miranda. I often ring him up at his ancient mansion in Lutolim, Goa. As in the old days at the Oyster Apartments in Mumbai, he picks up the phone on the first ring and recognises my voice instantly. His voice is always pleasant and cheery, the voice of a man who has no quarrels with life.
Mario is blessed with the even Goan temperament, which, I think, is the most enviable virtue in Goans. Nothing bothers them, they are never hassled. They may not be an outrageously happy people, but they are contented.
Mario has always been a contented soul. With a little push and a lot of ambition, he could have been India’s No. 1 cartoonist and illustrator. He has the artistic talents for this, and some of his drawings are a little short of paintings. But while others have gone on to do commissioned pieces and hold exhibitions, he has been content doing cartoons for newspapers and sketches for advertisers. And since he does not know how to bargain, or is embarrassed to bargain, he has always been paid little for his work and often done it for free.
My personal favourites among Mario’s works are his Illustrated Weekly covers, those intricately designed drawings packed with people, faces, scenes, street signs, leaning skyscrapers, sleeping dogs, pan-chewing stock-brokers, busy executives caught in traffic jams, bemused policemen with rice bellies.
And I like the sketches he has done on his travels, Germany under a white sheet of winter with a single yellow Volkswagen, and Jerusalem in various shades of pious grey and black.
In Bombay, his great pleasure was to go to the movies, where he used to spend his many matinees. That is one thing he misses in Goa. TNT is fine, but how many times is he going to see the same old movies.
He does occasionally come to Bombay to do odd jobs, a panel for Dinesh Khanna’s ‘The Club’, a series of drawings for the Konkan Railway, illustrations for an industrial house, and he times his visit to coincide with the release of big movies in town. To find him in Bombay, I have to go to a movie house.
But in Goa, it is always easy to find Mario. Just pick up the phone and ring him up in Lutolim. He has a small den in that large house of grand ballrooms, bedrooms with four-poster beds and ancestral spirits, a family chapel, and a kitchen as large as a modern apartment. The den is now his studio, though I think he would prefer to call it his work place. The walls have paintings done and gifted by his artist friends, and the room has a fax machine for him to keep in touch with Bombay, Bangalore, etc.
This is where he sits and works through the day, doing his intricate drawings, sketching cities that have been captured in his mind. And occasionally the work is interrupted by a phone call from a friend who is missing him.
-Busybee, March 17, 1999
