Far too many words have already been written about him for one more hack to scribble lines that may sound worthwhile. Yet how do you go about avoiding a man who changed your views on life and literature? What more can you say about the written word when sentences take you beyond the mundane, beyond the skies into a realm that even the gods have not trodden upon?  We who live lives bordering on some kind of inanity, we who pontificate on half-baked values, what  more can we do but seek relief in a writer who finds order in chaos, or, when you come to think of it, slapstick magic in harsh realism? Early 1983. Modern Book Depot. Guwahati. One picks up the book merely because one had picked up each year’s Nobel laureate as a matter of habit. No name-dropping. No attempt at some kind of high brow activism.…