The Toon Titan’s Back in Town

The Toon Titan’s Back in Town

An admirer walked up to Mario Miranda at a think-tank party in Mumbai last week. “Sir, I miss your cartoons on Bombay.” “And I miss Bombay,” replied Miranda, genuinely trying to cheer up his avowed fan. And as he said that, a camouflaged emotion a strong instinctive feeling for the city he so well manages to hide triggered off in him.

All those who thought Mario Miranda would probably forget Bombay (the city which almost trapped him in shuffling files at Mantralaya), once he settled in the quiet climes of Goa a few years ago, think back in time the years when the creator of Miss Fonseca bonded with Bombay beyond his nine-to-five job; when Bombay’s colonial buildings beckoned him to breathe black ink into their arches; when in its torrential rains, he found his pen couldn’t do without a paper. How could then Mario Miranda stay away for long?

Now for the good news...

Mario Miranda is back to put together another book capturing the myriad moods of his good old Bombay, a city which made Miranda a name to reckon with in the world of cartooning; a city, which, to this cleverly humourous man, has been like London to Charles Dickens, albeit in a slightly different way. While Dickens depicted hunger, squalor and the lost childhood on London streets, Miranda found his subjects in Bombay’s magnificent buildings, its great downpour, its countless eateries and its burgeoning populace.

After lot of persuasion, the somewhat reclusive Miranda agreed to chat up and spend a long afternoon in one corner of The Oberoi Hotel lobby. “You are punctual. I like it,” he says in a paternal tone sitting on the sofa. So, what is the book on Mumbai about? “It is a long conceived book comprising drawings of classical buildings, its landmarks like Flora Fountain, south Indian restaurants in Matunga and Irani restaurants like Kiyani and Bastani near Metro,” he says, pausing for a while, before adding: “Look at the Victoria Terminus. See the buildings on the either side of D N Road. The University Building, The High Court, The Regal Cinema... all look so magnificent. They are part of the city’s history, with each one of them telling a story, for which my drawings will become the medium,” he says.

Telling stories comes easy to Miranda. After tickling the funny bones of many a reader for close to five decades, he is now concentrating on cartoon books. To his credit are Laugh It Off, Sketchbook, Goa With Love and many children’s books. Though every book has been special to him, this yet untitled book on Mumbai is significant for various reasons, one being “differently activating the grey cells”.

Miranda always dared to think differently. His father had packed him off from Bangalore to “study hard” and sit for the IAS exams. Had the young student at St Xaviers College in the 1960s listened to his father, he would have been rummaging through files in Mantralaya. Instead, he chose to tread a differently difficult path a cartoonist living on the edge. If Bombay made Miranda do something different and creative, it also prepared him for an adventurous career. Ask him the obvious, his motivation, and pat comes the reply: “Movies. I am a movie buff. A good movie can change your life. It was films that made me think big.” Oh Bollywood! “No. Only English films, so much so that I would watch three in a row one in Regal, second in Sterling and third in Central Plaza. Isn’t it madness?,” he asks laughingly, saying he plans to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

But now Mumbai is not his Bombay. And Miranda is justifiably pained. “It’s seen a lot of changes. And I am not talking about physical changes. It’s hearts that have changed,” he bemoans. He should know. How can he forget thelarge-hearted D F Karakka, editor of the long defunct Current, who gave him his break as a cartoonist in the 1960s, when he was still an undergraduate at St Xavier’s College? “My first assignment was to sit through a performance by an American all-woman dance troupe and make a drawing for the paper. Mr Karakka was so impressed that he hired me on the spot. That cartoon fetched me Rs 50, a good money in those times,” Miranda says.

Later, his Miss Fonseca, the secretary in skirt and top, became popular, sometimes an object of ridicule among the front-line feminists. “In those days, most of the secretaries in offices were Anglo-Indian women who invariably wore skirts. Anyway, women, whether in print or sketch, are popular with readers.

Aren’t they?,” he asks, discreetly scanning some beautiful faces sitting in the hotel lobby. His best days with women were the ones he spent in Lisbon and Paris where he had gone on a scholarship. “I spent my first evening in Paris at a pub. Women in flimsy clothes danced, while men got sozzled. I had a wonderful time,” he reminisces. Like Khushwant Singh, he feels comfortable in the ‘company of women’. Did he catch the “virus” from the celebrated author with whom he worked in The Illustrated Weekly of India? “I learnt better things from him. A man of ideas, he has a great sense of humour. At the Weekly, he made the work fun,” reminisces Miranda, who along with Khushwant, had extensively covered themurder trial of gangster Raghavan during the Seventies.

And as for cartooning, he is not happy with the state of cartooning in India. “We have a lot of young, talented cartoonists, especially in Kerala. But they are not interested in reading. At workshops and individual meetings, I tell them to read extensively, to hone their ability, to think creative,” says Miranda who devoured from P G Woodhouse to Charles Dickens and from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. “You know, Rushdie has stayed in my house in Goa,” he says with pride. Next time Miranda meets Rushdie, the latter will remember a few drawings on the walls of the house.