One day, a master magician came to school. The school auditorium was packed with excited children. There is nothing that elicits as much thrill and awe as a magic show. The master was at his best; he materialised a rabbit out of a hat, a bouquet of flowers from an empty basket and spun an entire design suspended in mid-air with steel hoops! When he asked for volunteers from the audience, students made a dash to the stage. Who wouldn’t want to be part of the show?
He finally selected my classmate but once the act began, we were glad we didn’t make it. Sridhar had to swallow an entire tennis ball. In the audience, we were worried sick. Next, he pressed Sridhar’s tummy, and what popped out of Sridhar’s mouth was not the ball, but an endless stream of coloured ribbon! Later in class, Sridhar was surrounded, and we scrutinised the insides of his mouth for any ribbon remnants! There were none.
But the act that took centre stage was when the master tore a newspaper to bits and stuffed it in a glass. He began his special incantation and asked the audience to repeat the magic words with him. At the end of it, the glass turned to milk!
It was truly an age of innocence. I rushed home, threw the school bag away, tore up the newspaper and stuffed it in a glass. I recalled the magic words, down to the last syllable. It was such an expectant moment, but nothing happened! The disappointment was hard to swallow. The next day, we cross-checked the magic words with the “class-brain”, who had a photographic memory. Despite some alterations made in the chant, the secret code failed to work. It was a let-down, as if we were so close and yet so far. One of life’s first lessons was learnt the hard way.
These days, we miss the roadside magician. His show was in the open — a busy thoroughfare or a market-square. His narration kept the audience captive for an entire hour, as he built up the suspense. When the crowd swelled to the optimum, he unveiled the trick. The audience gasped as his boy disappeared into thin air after entering a basket! Magic came in smaller packages too — those endless tricks with a pack of cards. The surprise was much the same that someone could guess the exact card that you selected! And the day you learnt a card trick, you couldn’t wait till you showed it to everyone, often stumbling in the act!
Magic tickles the curiosity and teases the intellect. There is a suspension of belief and an irresistible compulsion to solve the puzzle. Many years later, in the U.S., we watched a programme on TV where some of the famous magic acts were decoded. It was dissected piecemeal, till we understood the angles used by the magician, the secret compartments in his equipment and his distraction techniques. We wished we had not seen the programme. It was a total spoilsport, as if someone announced the name of the killer, when you were half-way through your suspense novel.
Life would be pedestrian without magic, robbed of all wonder. For the discerning observer, there is magic everywhere. There is magic in the rain, in the twinkling stars of a night sky, in the flower that blooms and in the eyes of a newborn baby.
