Passion-Fruit Mojo

WITH the top hat, ’tache and three-piece, Gopinath Muthukad almost looks straight out of a Lee Falk comic panel.

- Siddharth Premkumar

“Sorry, I didn’t bring my cape,” Kerala’s most famous magician says. The late-noon throng of school kids doesn’t care. As the meme goes, not all heroes wear one. And, anyway, Muthukad is more David Copperfield than Mandrake. Like the illusionist icon, he operates in the gulf between science and superstition. His currency: vismayam. Wonder.

Right now, he’s operating on two hours of sleep. The showman’s ease fine-tuned over a decades-long career—some 8,000 stages in over 50 countries—barely masks the toll of a red-eye flight. But the show must go on. And today’s was important— both as culmination and vindication of six months of work and years more of planning. Students of Muthukad’s Different Art Centre—a project to nurture the talents (magical and otherwise) of differently-abled children—have put up a spirited, non-stop, hour-long magic show.

It’s all Muthukad can talk about. “They are going to be featured in India Book of Records,” he beams. In an office space chock-full of honours and paeans to hard work, including the Merlin award he won in 2011, becoming, after his one-time guru P.C. Sorcar Jr, only the second Indian to win the Oscar of Magic, this latest feather-in-the-cap fits right in.