To call Mario a cartoonist would be like seeing no more than the elegant living room he entertained you from,through a long warm Goan evening. Take a break and be my guest, he said. Come and sketch the whole of this house. Should take a week or so if I keep a close eye on you to make sure you dont run off to do the days cartoon. The 17th-century Portuguese mansion,very much part of the Mario-lore,is a grand heritage home in Loutalim,in Goas Salcette district,with many unused rooms,hand-done period furniture,complete with a banquet hall. Marios drawings estimated conservatively at 50,000 add up to matching grandeur and proclaim his status as Indias peerless comic artist. Mario did cartoon for newspapers and magazines because that was and still is the only lifeline available to the practitioner here. His Miss Fonseca and Rajni Nimbupani however were no mere props for ventilating the days news comment. The characters came to life with pure fun and entertained readers,incredibly enough through the deprived decades of a third world democracy. His richly detailed comic frames had no mandatory starkness that marked the more familiar news cartoon. No wonder he missed no chance to take off to any corner of the world to escape the newsroom tyranny. To be with people and places,which was where his art at its best was made. Mario never claimed to be a political cartoonist. To be quite frank. Im not even a cartoonist. I draw. Give me a pen and blank paper and I will draw. I just love to draw. To the reader though,he was no less than the best of the lot. Within hours of his death,most calls I got were from ardent fans of Abu Abraham and O V Vijayan who were already missing this sheer delight and wondering where they can find his work. Mercifully,his drawings have been fondly documented in a thick book published by Gerard da Cunha and Architecture Autonomous,Mario de Miranda. The British gave us the cartoon and a language to cartoon in. Mario however grew up on Portuguese and picked up his English only during his college days in Bangalore. His comic setting however came early enough thanks to an earlier coloniser from Portuguese Goa,his home since the 1930s. The 16th-century Roman Catholic masonry gave his wicked pencil much to explore and if this wasnt anachronistic enough,local flavour was increasingly spicing up the east-west mela. The compulsive comic narrator couldnt have asked for more. Right through his school and college days,Mario kept a diary of sketches. This was the training no art school could have given him. He further advanced his art on the lines of the legendary Ronald Searle who took one look at his drawings and proffered the much needed tip,Dont draw like me. The British master must have clearly seen that the young artist needed no mentoring. The essential Mario mould had already been set and was destined to draw laughter against all odds.
