Biography
- Manohar Malgaonkar
It was to this Goa that, in the early nineteen thirties, Custodio Miranda took his family when he retired from Government service. The family’s home-coming was a feast of delights to young Mario. He was now a kid in a very large family in a very large house. There were, in addition to his own parents and siblings, a grandfather and a grandmother and a baker’s dozen of pets: eight dogs, a squirrel, a crow, a white pig called Zecca, a monkey called Jacob and a deer which was later to be given its name what else? Bambi.
The patriarch grandfather figures in several of Mario’s sketches, a tall man wearing a thick quilted solar topee and striped pyjamas, a cigar stuck in his mouth, doing the rounds of his estates. Of his grandmother, Mario says:
“She used to sit on a rocking chair, and select the records she wanted played. Classical music; mostly vocal... Entire operas such as Fidelio, The Barber of Seville, Andrea Chenier...! My job was to wind up the gramophone. It was at her feet that I developed my taste for western classical music.” As she listened, she would tell the stories of the operas to Mario who could never have enough of them.
About once every week, his father would, invite his cronies for a poker session which dragged on until the small hours of the morning. The players cursed and swore and laughed uproariously, drank a lot of whisky and smoked Havana cigars. To Mario Miranda it came as a revelation that grown ups too could get so merry and high-spirited.
In Loutolim, they were a compact community. Everyone knew everyone else and met at least once a week, if not in the taverna, then at a church service.
The church was where interesting things happened such as processions, weddings, choir practices, and as a kid and even later in life, these activities have been the themes of Mario Miranda’s large-scale drawings. As a child, Mario had been taught to pay respect to the clergy, and to stop talking whenever the Angelus bells began to toll. Whenever he came across a priest, he had to bend and kiss his hand. He did as he was told, but at another level he found the priests to be a readymade foil for caricatures.
In those days they were required to wear dark hats with wide brims and shoes with enormous metal buckles. At times, say in a stiff breeze with their robes flying and holding on to their hats, they looked so funny that he just could not resist making drawings of them. True, he did his best to hide these drawings from their subjects, but one of the priests felt so affronted that he complained to Mario’s mother and when she, for her part, tried to make excuses for her son, he told her to take him to the Bishop who would know how to discipline her son for his naughtiness.
“The Bishop was convulsed with laughter when he saw it,” Mario reports, “He told my mother not to do anything to stop her son from making drawings. ‘He has a natural talent. Let him develop it.’”