Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

Bombay was a wonderland, full of temptations, with snares for the unwary. Mario was lucky in having a friend like Polly Vaz who knew his way around Bombay. He expanded his circle of friends, went to parties, took girls to cinemas and to nightclubs. On Sundays he usually showed up at the Cathedral of the Holy Name on Woodhouse Road for Mass, so that he could meet his friends from Goa. From the church they went to a restaurant for lunch where they ordered Coca Colas and added rum or gin to them from the flasks they carried.

Life had acquired a routine. He shared his room in the office with Behram Contractor, a Parsi journalist of about his own age. Contractor was a sub-editor in the group. He wrote an amusing column every day under the pseudonym ‘Busybee’, for one of the group’s publications, The Evening News, which mainly catered to office goers returning home on the suburban trains in the evenings.

After their work, Behram Contractor and Mario would walk to some Irani tea shop and sit talking over cups of rich tea and a pile of gutli bread which they broke with their fingers and ate piece by piece, smearing each piece with butter and dunking it in their tea, and as they ate they talked about the things they hoped to do. They became close friends and remained so for life.

At this time, he too was getting to be known, and total strangers would come up to him at restaurants or on local trains to tell him how much they had liked his cartoon or drawing in some recent issue of Femina or The Weekly. Characters which later acquired identity as “Miss Fonseca” and “Godbole” and “Rajani” had already begun to appear and reappear in the pictures that he drew for either Femina or Filmfare.