Secrets and surprises are on the verge of extinction. The age of surveillance, in active collaboration with the upsurge of predictability, drives away any possibility of the unexpected. There are no surprises anymore — our diet is pre-determined by the ambition for ‘good health’, our sleeping patterns by sleeping pills and the alarm clock, our days by the industrial rhythm of the workplace (targets and deadlines, semesters and quarterly reports), our socialising by current fads of food and drinks, our reading habits by bestseller lists and media hard-sell, the music by how much they are capable of moving our bodies on dance floors, the hierarchy of our relationships by the way we arrange numbers on our speed dial. I often have the sense of being food heating inside a microwave oven — 30 seconds and I’d be ready for consumption. Everything is pre-determined, the moment of consumption and the moment of abstention — we are both props and actors in Chaplin’s Modern Times . Where is the surprise on supermarket shelves?

Letters don’t come in the mail, almost nothing except bank statements and other missives from the bureaucracy. Text messages are variants of forwarded messages that you’ve had squatting in your inbox already. On your phone, auto-predict second-guesses you, killing choices and surprises. And yet, in spite of our semi-machine lives, and our easy appropriation by the mechanical, we hunger for surprise.

Is this why we go to nature, to be surprised? By nature I mean the shorthand for what passes for the conglomerate of plant and animal life. Gardener or passer-by, the winking bloom of a bud still charms us, as if it was something completely new; like the colour of the sky at sunset, new and old every day. The shape of moss colonies on damp walls — how they stroke our imagination, and how we conjure up animals and faces and maps of countries. The remainders of footsteps on grass, of the path taken through a field — this living archive of journeys. Fallen flowers, fallen from rain, fallen from age — tracing the margins of the tree, how they make us smile at their artfulness. Human corpses do not fall with such graceful symmetry — the comparison arrives in your mind without effort. Surprise comes because it’s not routine. The mango-giving tree of this year might not produce a single fruit next summer.

And yet, a mission for the eradication of surprise seems to be on adrenaline. Nature is being bleached of the possibility to surprise. A couple of years ago, on a road trip from Bodh Gaya to Patna, I was surprised by the unexpected beauty of yellow flowers on roadside trees. Seasonal garden flowers, pampered for three months every year, were yet to make an appearance. The dust-annotated view through the carelessly scrubbed car windows imported something more than their beauty into the car — it was the delight of surprise. Not one copper pod tree but many, which, of course, is where the surprise lay. (For there’s the conditioned difference between the surprise of chancing upon one leopard in a sanctuary and a giant swarm of insects, not one.) But the surprise was short-lived — the consciousness of this collective of copper pod trees being planted by the forest department arrived soon after.

William Wordsworth had perhaps seen a similar collective of yellow a little more than 200 years ago:

... A host of golden daffodils.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance .

But there is a difference between Wordsworth’s ‘ten thousand saw I at a glance’ and my initial surprise at the ‘never-ending line’ of copper pod trees. No gardener had planted the daffodils ‘along the margin of a bay’; the roadside trees had been engineered into being a collective, a series, by bureaucracy, perhaps for no other reason except their indulgence to the eye. This had poisoned the capacity for surprise. The trees, to my eyes, suddenly turned into soldiers in uniform, performing a designated task — like the march past is supposed to stir some emotion, the trees, too, were meant to perform beauty, to entertain travellers.

There is a difference between men in uniform and stars in the sky. Each unit is related to the other in some way, and their optic similarity is meant to stress that relation, but fatigues bring us no surprise; not all the stars twinkle in the same way every day. Surprise gives blood to beauty, which is why chance, even coincidence, excites us. A child’s words but not a politician’s spin. Rain but not a shower in a bathroom. Flowers which wither and die but not their likeness in plastic.

And it is for surprise that we go to a forest and not a park.

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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