K.S. Chithra says the other artists were cleared a month before Mohanlal's visa stalled

Dubai: Everyone was in Sydney. The venue was ready, the band had arrived, K.S. Chithra was there, Manoj K. Jayan was there, Aju Varghese was there. Every visa in the group had been approved roughly a month earlier.

Every visa but one.

Mohanlal spent Saturday in a hotel in Singapore, waiting for an approval that never came, while a convention centre on the other side of the Coral Sea filled with people who had nothing to perform.

Not in India, and not in Australia.

Mohanlal had flown as far as Singapore and stayed there for two days, waiting for the approval to land so he could complete the journey. According to Chithra, that is where he remained while the hours ran down.

His team was already at the Norwest Convention Centre. He was three thousand miles away, refreshing an inbox.

Vaikittu Endha Paripadi was not a one-man show. Stephen Devassy, Manoj K. Jayan, Aju Varghese and Kalabhavan Shajohn were all on the bill alongside Chithra, and all of them were in Sydney by Saturday.

So was the crew. So was the venue. So, presumably, was a good deal of catering.

Kayal Events put it plainly: everyone had arrived, but the show could not go ahead without its headliner.

There is a difference between a visa being refused and a visa not arriving, and this was the second.

Kayal Events has stated the application was never rejected and is still under consideration. No one has suggested Australian authorities declined him on character, security or any other ground, and the department does not comment on individual cases.

The application simply had not been decided by the time he needed to board.

Mohanlal's own account was more pointed than the short clips suggested.

He noted that he has performed on stage internationally for decades, including in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany this year alone, and that in nearly fifty years in the industry this had never happened to him once.

He also declined to blame anyone. "I don't know how this happened. It might be a clerical mistake, and I am taking the blame for it," he said in a video recorded in Singapore, apologising to ticket holders and organisers.

Whether a man in Singapore can be responsible for a clerical error in an Australian visa office is another matter.

The event is listed as postponed rather than cancelled.

Existing tickets remain valid. Kayal Events has said a new date and venue will be announced, along with options for anyone who cannot make the rescheduled show, and that details will follow shortly.

Nothing further has been announced since Saturday.

Nobody has yet answered the obvious questions.

Has the visa arrived since Saturday. When does the show return, and can an entire cast realistically be flown back out at short notice. And, most curiously, why did one application in a group submission sit unresolved for a month while the rest cleared.

Group applications for touring artists are routine administrative work. One name stuck in the system while eight others sailed through is not, and no explanation has been offered by anyone.