Thursday 26 November 2009

I'm gonna tell you about Mr Aslam

This summer I met a guy called Mr Aslam.

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That's him. And his horse. His horse didn't have a name, which made me think of that song a little.

I think it must have been the third or fourth day of my holiday. Through some bizarre fit of circumstance my ten day stay in Delhi turned into a flight to Kashmir, a stay on a Dal Lake house boat and then a trek around the mountains. The guy who owned the house boat offered to drive me to stay with a family about seventy miles away from the Lake in the mountains - for a ridiculous price of course, I'm a pretty ignorant traveller.


The house was teetering on the inside of a colossal V-shape carved into a mountain, at the very bottom a white river ran endlessly. I was introduced to Mr Aslam. He was my age (20) and had three children. He made his money showing nervous looking backpackers around the mountains, sometimes for months at a time.

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I think we must have sat here for about two hours. He asked me which religion I was, to make things simpler I just said Christian. His response was something like this:

'That's okay, you are from Jesus Christ. I am Muslim. No matter. Your skin is white, I am brown. It's the same...'

It was around about that time that I realised that he was my favourite person ever.

He started singing for a while, then he asked me to sing something. The only thing that come into my head was 'Let Down' by Radiohead. He gave me a really strange 'funny westerner' look when I explained that the line I was singing was about growing wings and flying away.

We went even further away from the village and the track kind of sort of disappeared. Except for these totally insane bridges, made from logs and rocks.

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He asked me to ride the horse across it, I said I'd prefer not to. So without a second thought he takes the horse across the bridge. He was ten foot above the river, which would have dragged his helpless body for many miles before it would even consider letting him touch land again.

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We continued for a while longer, then he sat me down on a rock and said he'd be back in five minutes.

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...Then five minutes later he comes back with a rucksack full of fucking fish.

The fish (trout I learned) got made into a curry that evening. It was probably the freshest meal I've ever eaten. When the House Boat owner returned he said it was up to me to decide how much money I should give the boy.

"The boy?.." I thought "The guy's got three kids.."

Before I left I gave Mr Aslam 1000-Rupees (£15.00), which I worked out would have kept his kids in school for three months.

Thinking back, I had absolutely no idea where the hell I was. I can look at a map and think 'Okay there's Dal Lake, I was within 70 miles of that'. But Dal Lake is huge. I could have been anywhere.