That makes him a seeker of miracles. Yet 36-year-old Franz is someone who has made a NASA spacecraft and a 40-storey building vanish, done the girl-chopping act that one sees in the Sircar shows and has also made people levitate.

He has come to the Capital from Michigan with a band of two score technicians to manufacture illusions next week for those who are willing to wear blinkers, be kids and believe in the impossible.

He got his first lessons in the craft of creating illusions when he got a toy magic machine on his 14th birthday. He tried more tricks, first small ones and then bigger ones, till he decided that he could do anything. ``I was too full of myself. I could simulate anything. No miracles ormystical powers amazed me. Everything was possible.''

Till he met Sunny, an Indian, in Malaysia. ``He grabbed my hand and told me in two minutes explicit details of my past life. I felt humbled.'' Ever since he says the very philosophy of his magic has changed. ``Earlier I was full of me. Now I am outside it all.'' He gives the example of the vase-trick he intends to perform in Delhi during his four-day shows. The vase is shattered and then it resurrects itself on its own. ``The creation and destruction are happening on their own. I am not there. Six years ago I wouldn't have thought of such an illusion that excludes me.''

``Technology is my game and I am using it to communicate to the audience that split-second of wonder that occurs between the trick and the viewer, the wonder that we have all felt as a child, the wonder that is there still in everything that happens in this world and nature,'' he says.

Franz can make people appear to be in a place other than they originally are. He can fake space.Fine. Can he fake time as well?

He says yes. No, he does not move you ten years into your past or future. He places five pieces of paper with five different signs drawn on them. He draws a sign on another piece which he keeps to himself. Then he asks us to choose one. This one has the same sign as the one with him. So he can claim to have seen into the future. But he hardly predetermined it! Not a miracle man anyway.

Levitation? Yes, he says and turns his palms to his face, and a pen he had begins to move back and forth behind the palm screen. His finger is at work, obviously. ``I know I am missing an opportunity to be god. But I am just a fake,'' he says.

``Not one mystic bone in my body. I am looking for the real magic. It is there. I know it. And I think I will find it in India,'' the illusionist says.

Franz, who will marry his Japanese interpreter in March next year, says his magic is nothing before the tremendous spirituality of the people of India. He finds it everywhere.

As for India'smisery, its illiteracy, corruption, he says there is a system here despite the apparent chaos. Apparently.