Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

After graduation, Mario Miranda hoped that he would soon be on his way to Paris, but in 1948 his father died, “and that ended my aspirations to go and study art in Paris,” he laments. Instead, he rushed off to Goa.

It was a sad homecoming. It took months before life returned to some sort of normalcy. And as he began to go out, he discovered that life in Goa had a new verve. Its stagnating economy had taken a u-turn and, in 1948 Goa was undergoing an economic upsurge. Still ruled by Portugal, Goa had become the freeport for luxury goods and gold that India craved but was forbidden to import. Dozens of Goan merchants became millionaires.

Mario Miranda, now twenty-one and fond of the good life, fitted snugly into the dynamics of this lifestyle. “I just loafed around,” he remembers. “My grandmother had left a lot of books. I spent my time reading them or listening to operas on her gramophone.” Gaiety, merriment was what he sought. He organized dance parties at his own house, where they danced till the small hours of the morning to the music provided by a local band under the light of hissing Petromax lamps.

But characteristically enough, even while he was living this decadent life, he was also busy filling out those notebooks with the scenes of his village. The church, its congregations, its processions, figure in his drawings again and again, as do private houses, tavernas, street scenes, the bustle of the market place dominated by fat fisherwomen wearing chains of flowers in their hair.

Then one day his conscience rebelled. He began to feel embarrassed wallowing in soçegado, doing nothing, leading a Bohemian life while most of his colleagues had to work for a living. He headed back to Bombay, that Mecca of job-seekers. He was armed with a B.A. degree, but he took with him his diaries too… just in case.

He took a room in a chummery called Rockville on the Arthur Bunder Road, which room he shared with other tenants. It was a seedy locality. “Not actually a Red Light district, but there was a lot of prostitution going around,” he recalls.