All magic is a learned skill: A Wknd chat with award-winning mentalist Suhani Shah

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You know the stories we tell ourselves, in our search for answers, for hope, or just to get through a hard day? For mentalist Suhani Shah, true magic lies just there: in belief.

"It is belief that turns stones into gods, after all, isn't it," she says.

Shah, 35, has been a practising magician since she was seven. She began as an illusionist and is now a mentalist. Through her tricks and mind games, she says, she is always chasing the same question: What determines what we choose to believe?

Her tricks themselves are extraordinary: she appears to guess a person's crush, routinely unlocks strangers' phones. "This too, of course, is a learned skill. It is not a supernatural ability. No magic is," she says, smiling.

Shah recently won Best Magic Creator at the World Championship of Magic, held every three years by the Switzerland-based International Federation of Magic Societies. "It feels unreal. The nomination, which they informed me about two months ago, hadn't even sunk in yet, when they announced the win," she says.

In addition to her stage shows and appearances on TV morning shows around the world, she runs a YouTube channel (with over 4.5 million subscribers) where she periodically demonstrates how she performs some of her simpler tricks. With each show and each demonstration, she says, the aim is to send a deeper message: Don't believe everything you see; question it all. "I want to use my art to fight blind faith," she says.

Excerpts from an interview.

Tell us about the TV show that sparked it all for you...

I remember it was a Sunday morning, in our Ahmedabad home, and a magician was on TV. He borrowed money from an audience member, made it disappear, then made it reappear from within an apple. It blew my mind. I remember thinking, "How did he do that, and more importantly, how can I do that?"

My parents (Chandrakant Shah and Snehlata Shah) ran a garment-exports business, but encouraged us in anything we wanted to try. My brother Geet and I took up badminton, swimming. We could try anything, they said, as long as we committed, showed up and took it seriously.

It got so serious that you switched to home-schooling and went on tour, at the age of seven.

Well, once my parents agreed to let me pursue this, we all wanted to give it our best shot. A magician in Ahmedabad put us in touch with a family of magicians that lived an hour away, the Joshis. Kalpesh and Saloni Joshi very kindly opened up to us, and agreed to teach me. Very few people would do that.

They taught me how to use sleight of hand, cues from my team, and costumes, as part of my act. We watched DVDs of international performances together. It never felt like work; it felt like the best kind of play time.

After about eight months, I was ready with my first stage show: a three-hour performance with just one 15-minute break. It was called Jaadugar Suhani. This was my chance to showcase everything I had learnt and I had so much fun! I sawed a person in half, set a girl on fire and rescued her, did tricks with bouquets of flowers. I couldn't imagine not doing this forever.

As bookings came in, to other cities and then other countries, I became a home-schooled travelling magician. We toured with a 30-member crew that included the Joshis, in a van filled with magic paraphernalia: odd swords, hats, glittery costumes, wands and whatnot.

Why the switch from illusion to mentalism?

By 2017, I had been doing magic for 20 years. I felt stretched too thin; something felt off.

I decided to hit pause. I spent a month by myself in Himachal Pradesh, then returned home (Shah was then living in Goa and now lives in Mumbai), but stayed largely logged out. In this time, I observed how quickly others' perspectives of me changed. Friends and relatives began to say I was a child prodigy who had fizzled out, and that it was time to "get me married".

As a child doing magic shows, I had learnt early on that perspective works in mysterious ways. What was, to me, so obviously a learned skill was "supernatural" or "devi-shakti (the power of a goddess)" to many adult viewers. I wanted to explore this more deeply. I realised that if I moved to mentalism, I could really explore the intriguing ways in which human behaviour works.

Was it a hard shift to make?

For the first time in my career, I was working with almost no props. There was a lot less room to hide. At my first show, it was just me, at a college in Goa, interacting with students. But a video of the show began to do the rounds and I was flooded with bookings, from corporations and IIMs. Everyone wanted to see if they could figure out how I was guessing people's crushes and the numbers in their heads.

This too, of course, is a learned skill; it's not a supernatural ability. No magic is.

There are people who just don't believe that, though...

Oh, they don't. At any given time, I have emails asking me things like, "What's my girlfriend's phone passcode?" Or, "I've studied for my test but I'm really sick. Can you suggest questions that are likely to be in the paper?" Or, "Can you tell me the lottery numbers? We'll split the prize 50-50."

I have also got some heart-breaking questions. Someone wrote in saying their child has autism and cannot communicate. "Can you tell us what he's thinking?" the person wrote. It hurts to say it, but I can't help with something like this.

Is that part of your larger mission, to remind people to question what they think they're seeing?

Yes... one reason I want to perform magic is because of the joy it brings people, and me. But there's another side to all this. I've realised, over time, that when people are hurting or vulnerable, they seek answers. Give them an answer, any answer, and they will cling to it if it helps them feel better.

There are a lot of people misusing sleight of hand and other tricks to exploit this blind faith. I want to remind people of the power of belief. I want to spread rationality, encourage them to ask questions.

How has all this changed you?

I think I am a more sensitive, empathetic and rational person than I would have been without magic.

I'm the biggest sceptic there is, because I know what goes into creating illusions.

But I also believe in the everyday magic of the universe: the unanswerable questions, the way connections are formed, the way patterns emerge in people, the way a plant can sometimes grow without sunlight or soil, through a crack in the concrete.