George Menezes

A friend of mine wanted me to write about how I became a writer and what were the influences that made me want to write.
I had just started to deal with the questions in my column for January 2012, when I got the devastating news that one of my closest friends had gone to his eternal rest.
So I quickly decided that I would turn the column around and pay a tribute to Mario Miranda
Mario Miranda has been a secret part of my bloodstream. He provided the” feni” to the “sorpotel” of my writings. With the result that most people bought my books because of Mario and I guess never read a word of what I wrote.
Not even a day after his death there was some criticism of him on the net by his fellow Goans. One was that he was irresponsible and unreliable because he had promised to do some illustrations for the net-writer’s book and he never delivered. The other criticism was that he was merchandising himself allowing his drawings to be stamped on ashtrays wall hangings and so on.
Let me say with all the strength that I command that there was no better and more generous a human being than Mario Miranda and no greater artist. Reliable to the last.
I first met him in the classroom at St Xavier’s College Mumbai. There was a large crowd of extroverts in the class, some of whom, in later years, have become household names.
Mario was quiet and self-effacing. I had just arrived from Dharwar for a six-month stay in the College staying in the hostel and waiting till my father got his proper posting back to Dharwar.
I was at that time, a person with low self-esteem intimidated by the sophisticated college crowd. A person that my late wife’s convent bred friends called me many, years later “a country bumpkin with an “unda gunda” accent”.
Mario welcomed me warmly although we were meeting for the first time, and we shared the last bench in the class room.
While I was taking notes in longhand, I watched in fascination Mario making notes by making drawings of the person who was lecturing to us. Beautiful drawings of the professors and the girls in the class, a constant temptation for me to steal the notebooks
One day he said to me “George do you like to draw?” And I said to him “Mario, the only thing I can draw is water from the well at my ancestral home in Goa”. He laughed shyly and said to me “your sense of humour will stand you in good stead when the time comes”
Many, many years later, Mario did the cover of my first book “Pardon Your Middle Is Showing”.
The book was a collection of my “middles” in the Times of India . It showed me standing with the entire midriff naked to the world. The book was published by Longmans Orient and edited by a wonderful woman called Priya Adarkar.The book was sold out but the royalty was so miniscule that they paid me in postage stamps.
Mario also illustrated my second book “One Sip at a Time” which was released at the International Convention of Goans in Toronto, Canada
The illustrations in the book were incredible and I feel even today that I lived in the covers of that book more through the illustrations than through my writings. Mario refused any payment both for the cover of my first book and the illustrations in the second book which went into two editions.
As if that was not enough, he was generous enough to write a couple of sentences for the blurb of the book.
He wrote “whether his writings are filled with humour or with pathos George Menezes is among the best. His images and situations are so vivid, his descriptions so real that illustrating his prose is something I always look forward to”
Mario’s generosity was proverbial, his reliability unquestionable and his gentleness and nobility so transparent that talking about his little peccadillos hours after his death is unforgivable and petty.
It would be magnanimous for us to remember his generosity despite the financial problems he experienced from time to time. Problems that few people knew about.
Many beautiful articles have appeared in the press which cannot match this tribute. Mine, however inadequate, is a gigantic stretching out of my arms towards Mario and Habiba, two beautiful people who have adorned my life.