Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

Within a few months of arriving in Loutolim, Mario began to attend the local primary school. Here the medium of education was Portuguese, but the pupils spoke in Konkani and with them, Mario became fluent in the local language. They were a mixed lot at school, kids representing Loutolim’s ethnic compost, bhatkar, merchant, the butcher and the baker. They came to school barefoot. So Mario too, decided to go barefoot to school. He would set out for school properly shod, but remove his shoes as soon as he reached school and put them on back at the end of the day. “I hated wearing shoes,” he will tell you.

He was about ten years old when he found himself bowled over by the sheer physical beauty of a young girl from a farming family who would come to their well every morning to draw water. “I would hover near the well, waiting for her to come and would keep staring at her all the time she was around,” he remembers. His infatuation must have been noticed by his mother.

Mario Miranda never saw the girl again, for a few weeks later, he was sent off to Bangalore for higher studies. But her image kept haunting him and comes to life in his drawings, a stunningly beautiful girl carrying a pot of water, almost without him being aware of it.

Bangalore was another country. Mario Miranda who spoke the two languages of Goa, Konkani and Portuguese, could not make himself understood at all. The local language was Kannada; the language of the elite, English, and English was the medium of instruction at St. Joseph’s School. “I didn’t know a word of English and the other boys made fun of me,” he recalls.

With his natural flair for languages he soon learned enough English to be able to keep up with studies and within a few months spoke and wrote it as well as the other students for whom too it was a foreign language. His parents hired a small house in Bangalore not far from the school and sent a cook and another servant from Goa to run it.

All the while at school, he continued to keep those diaries - filling them up with line drawings of school life.

“My classmates appreciated my drawings,” Mario recently told an interviewer. “They would encourage me to do nude drawings of a lady teacher whom we had named Sticky Bum,” he recalls. “It got me into a lot of trouble.” The trouble could not have been anything serious, for he finished his schooling and passed his matriculation seven years later. He was now ready to go to college, and for this his parents decided to send him to Bombay.