Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

His room had four beds; his three room-mates were from Goa: Joe Albuquerque, Paul Miranda and Polly Vaz. Of them Vaz alone had a steady and well-paid job in the Airlines Hotel where he worked the night shift. It was not long before Polly Vaz appointed himself Mario’s mentor and guide. They became close friends and remain so to this day.
Mario did the rounds of newspaper offices. Most of the major chains already had their own staff cartoonist, and the smaller papers and magazines wanted someone who had been published. Mario was beginning to despair of ever making a living from his art when Polly suggested that he draw postcards of Bombay’s monuments and he would try to sell them to the guests at his hotel.

Within a few days, Mario made drawings of the Gateway of India, the Babulnath Temple, the Haji Ali Mosque and Flora Fountain. The hotel guests snapped them up. Here they were getting hand-drawn pictures for the price of a photographic reproduction. Soon Mario’s postcards began to sell as fast as he could produce them.
Polly Vaz then invented a hard luck story, of a deaf and dumb brother who wanted to stand on his own feet by drawing pictures and not depend on charity. The postcards had no price tag. It was up to the buyers to decide how much they wanted to contribute to the welfare of this deaf and dumb youth. They paid generously. At last Mario Miranda had begun to make real money.

Polly was resourceful, wise in the ways of the world. One day he confided to Mario that he would not be in Bombay for long because he was planning to migrate to Brazil. It was a vast country, full of opportunities for ambitious men and there was no Prohibition in Brazil.

Mario was instantly caught up in the spell of Brazil. He told Polly that he would join him. They would go to Brazil together. They applied for passports and began to save up from their earnings for the one-way trip to Brazil. And then one of the editors to whom Mario had shown his diaries a few days earlier, D F Karaka who ran The Current, a weekly newsmagazine, called him to his office. “I want you to attend a dance at the Taj Mahal Hotel, and do a scene of the people dancing this new dance that has become a craze, the Can-Can,” he told Mario. “If I like it, I will publish your picture”.

Mario Miranda loved doing crowds, depicting movement. He really went to town doing the dance scene. That picture still throbs with movement. Karaka was full of praise. He asked Mario to give him at least one drawing every week for The Current. He had appointed Mario Miranda as his paper’s regular cartoonist.
This was it. He had got his break. Suddenly all thought of making a life in Brazil just vanished. Bombay was the place where he would prosper. This was where his future lay. Polly too decided to stay on in India.