Learning magic is the easy part but becoming a performer, figuring out your stage persona — all of this takes a lot of work, says Suhani Shah, the 35-year-old magician who won the Best Magic Creator Award at the 2025 FISM World Championship of Magic.
FISM is a prestigious body and this championship, organised every three years, is something like the Olympics of the magic fraternity. This year, the six-day event was hosted by Italy.
Suhani has done over 5,000 shows globally. Earlier this year, she had a series of shows in the US.
Suhani does not come from the theatrical school of magic most of us in India are used to and love. Not for her any costumes, nor any elaborate wands or headdresses.
She walks on stage in her tailored suit, her hair worn in a short bob and a practised smile on her face, one that doesn’t betray any of the tricks up her crisp sleeves.
On a weekday afternoon, Suhani speaks to The Telegraph over a Zoom call from Singapore; she has a show there. She insists on keeping her camera off.
She says, “I try to keep it very natural and raw. I have tried on a lot of different characters, but I have failed miserably at trying to be anything that I am not.”
As she likes to put it, she is on stage who she is off stage. And therein lies her biggest trick: to make you forget you are speaking to a magician. She starts to speak about her childhood, how her interest in magic turned into a career.
“I was six years old when I watched a magic show on television,” says Suhani. “As children often do, I wished for something impossible — to be a magician, perform cool tricks, and fly on stage.” But before all that, she had to be trained in the craft of it.
She continues, “Back then, no magician was ready to teach a child. After almost a year, we found a family in Kallol, a small town near my home in Ahmedabad. They provided professional assistance to magicians. That’s how my training began.”
At seven, Suhani did her first show. It was an act engineered by her mother. That day, Suhani actually flew on stage.
Suhani dropped out of school after Class I. “It had become too difficult to keep up with my studies and also practise magic,” she says. “So, I just kept learning magic at home.”
Suhani is a mentalist. She describes magic as a parent category with sub-genres such as street magic, escapism, conjuring, teleportation, illusions... She says, “Mentalism too is a sub-genre. Here the illusion is created through a psychological impossibility.”
During her shows, she selects people from the audience through a lottery or a ball-throw, then proceeds to read their minds, their past, their dreams and aspirations. Every show is a new challenge, according to Suhani. “Sometimes I feel I am doing a forbidden thing,” she says.
But like any other magician, she too enjoys a challenge — the frowning sceptics, the indifferent teenagers, the know-it-all regulars. She says, “It’s the sceptics who keep this art form alive. If everybody started believing in magic, then that would turn magic into fact.”
The best part of the show so far as Suhani is concerned is when the sceptics are won over, even if for a fleeting moment. She says, “I love to see that look of wonder light up their faces. To see people believing in something they thought was impossible is a delight. That moment when they gasp and go, ‘how is it possible’ —that is my takeaway.”
Her voice sounds triumphant. Then she launches into what sounds like another one of her practised monologues: “The idea is that, in a world where we believe we know everything, in a world where everything is searchable, everything is so accessible, how
do I make people experience something so impossible? How do I get them into a territory that is so unknown?”
Her speech comes to an end and goodbyes are being said when just like that she turns her camera on for the first time. Her face appears and it is suffused with a knowing smile.
It is the smile of someone who knows she has once again delivered, kept the magic alive till the very end of the show.