Kamal Ghorui
How many a page, how singular a partnership we shared
1970s Bombay. Khushwant Singh had pulled The Illustrated Weekly of India out of its dog-eared irrelevance in dentists’ waiting rooms and taken it to kudos, controversy and a circulation thrice that of the current TOI. The daily was still the stolid Old Lady of Bori Bunder; we were the OG brat. In his third-floor corner sanctum sanctorum sat RK Laxman, legendary creator of the ‘common man’ but himself inaccessible to all but God’s appointee on earth, the TOI editor. One level above sat our open-door aristocrat, Mário João Carlos do Rosário de Brito Miranda, lightly shrugging off the weight of his Goan-Portuguese lineage. We shared this magazine floor with Dr Dharam Vir Bharati’s Dharmayug, Dr Jhangiani’s (de facto Vimla Patil’s) Femina, BK Karanjia’s Filmfare and Surinder Jha’s Science Today, but Mario was almost exclusively ours.
Almost exclusively mine too. He’d drawn the cartoons for my first Weekly contribution while I was but a trainee: ‘Earplug, Earplug, Here Cometh the Parsee’. Fresh from Calcutta, where my fellow qaumis were few and far between, I’d listed the eccentricities of Bombay’s ubiquitous Parsee ‘Baugs’. Mario, on the other hand, was already as steeped in his adoptive city as vindaloo in vinegar.
Our partnership lasted through my decade at the Weekly. His drawings with his own brand of humour enriched, not merely illustrated, my tongue-in-cheek cover stories. We were so unfailingly paired that, on occasion, I’d be complimented for someone else’s piece with his unmistakable imprimatur. While I didn’t take proxy credit, I did find a sly way of pumping up my byline, persuading Mario to incorporate it into his main, page-wide illustration.
This led to Mario’s twinkle-eyed ribbing, ‘ Bachi wants a byline bigger than the heading.’
Mario fitted naturally into the easy informality instituted by our non-hierarchical editor. An aghast AG, Noorani, intellectual powerhouse and regular Weekly visitor, had exclaimed ‘Khushwant, not only do you allow sub-editors to walk into your cabin, you actually ask them to sit!’ So juniormost me thought nothing of barging into my ‘accomplice’s’ little cubicle with a ‘Mario, copy’s fallen short, please please increase your D/c cartoon to 3/col.’ With mock despair, he’d promptly add a buxom lass here, a bandaged-tail dog there – often while cradling the phone in his left shoulder, and continuing the conversation I’d so brashly interrupted.
I must confess that Mario’s drawings were far more associated with Bombay’s quintessential columnist, ‘Busybee’, as iconic, as low-key as himself. He was still too much of the grandee to trawl through the city’s gut along with Busybee, chronicler and crusader of aromatic kababs grilled in malodorous alleys. But gluttonous me was a regular lunch-time companion. I thus became an ex-officio member of the rum-soaked, late evenings of the regular threesome of Busybee, Mario and that other much-missed journo, Vinod Mehta.
Mario lost the case to retain the beautiful, seafront Navy Nagar flat where the equally aristocratic Habiba had laid on such memorable Goan-Hyderabadi spreads. They returned to his 300-year-old, baronial mansion in South Goa’s Loutolim, with its vaulting gilded chapel, sprung ballroom floor and bullet-pocked fortified walls. When I last visited a couple of years before his passing in 2011, Mario looked as debonair as ever, but his old all-noticing eye was glazed by dementia.
Last weekend’s birth-centenary tributes unleashed an adrenaline rush of memories as detailed as the carnival on his sketchpad.
Alec Smart said: “Moorhi results. Jhaal for TMC, puffed rise for BJP.”
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