There are places in this country where life is one of the least important things. Cheap weapons have become a commodity, and life a liability. But then, there are misunderstood places. Places for which people will tell you all sorts of lies. Even if you hear a truth about them, it will be a mix of exaggeration and fiction with a negligible, minute quantity of truth.

Not very far from the nation’s capital, and near the provincial capital of a troubled province, this little town is one of those misunderstood places. Only because most of the cheap death in the country is brought upon by intentional or accidental criminals with weapons manufactured and assembled here, many think the place would be a murders’ den or a killers’ fest or a death valley.

Darra Adam Khel. Type the name in that favourite search engine of yours and see what appears. News items of bomb blasts, Taliban assassinating people publicly, government’s secret ammunition depot, ammunition, guns, gunfire … Deadly words and frightening sentences!

Yes, the first thing I heard the moment I got out of the car was a gunshot, followed by a five, 10 second pause and another boom, and another one, yet another… For the commoner there, however, it was nature’s rhythm. Even the mountains did not mind it, owning the echo, amplifying the blast. It must not have been different than the sound of the frequent train horn for the railway colony residents. “You hearing that, mate,” said my friend Arsalan Banbhan laughing, “That’s Darra, mate.” I thought to myself I was in the wrong place. I could have been fast asleep, drowning in a happy dream.

The five of us were to call on a friend who had invited us to his hujra (sitting room). Our host, Muneeb Afridi, the owner of an arms factory, received us. “You are on time,” he said with a smile. We then took a tour of the marketplace.

After a few steps away from the car, our group noticed two youngsters; turbaned, bearded faces, dressed in black shalwar kameez, with noticeably short, wide and baggy bottoms of their shalwars, Kalashnikovs in one hand, and mobile phones in the other. They seemed to be exchanging comments somehow related to their mobile phones. If not for the guns, the conversation was not different than any casual encounter, it seemed. One of us asked,

“Taliban?” Our host replied, “Not just Taliban, the good Taliban.” I laughed at the audacity of his reply. I think of it now and it dawns on me that my sarcastic intentions were quite evident to him. “Good Taliban, the ones that fight the bad Taliban,” he explained, with pauses based on emphatic glances, still smiling.

In the market street, the scene is quite shocking for the so-called civilized urban eye. Cartridges are being moved on cement carts, and in abundant quantity. Like candy vendors in a carnival, these cement carts, although not direct cartridge sellers can be seen every step of the way: the economic cement for this part of the world. Men, young and old, and children, too, carrying weapons like helmets held by motorcycle riders walking by in a Karachi market. One could see the smiles on their faces. They were signs of contentment, regardless of the fact that they had so little to cherish, and so much to curse, if observed by you and me.

The shop in Darra. -Photo by author

Before we could go see the hujra, Muneeb sahib took us to one of his fellow arms dealer’s ammunition shop. It was a small room in the middle of the market. The nine of us had so overcrowded the place, it was hard to get comfortable. Noticing our discomfort, the host and his friend, and two of his relatives who had joined us, almost sat outside the shop so that we could be at ease. Above our heads, hung the fruits of the war orchards, traces of the Afghan war that changed the very fate of the region: Automatic Kalashnikovs (AKs). “Can I hold one?” I asked, embarrassed, for a second, by the change in my tone. How so childish of me, I thought. “You can hold all of them!” Muneeb said, in the exact tone of a father who goes out with his kids to the local carnival. One by one, my friends and I held, loaded, pulled triggers with empty chambers and caressed the architecture of these sweet little killing machines our host kept picking up and handing over to us like toys.

The Automatic Kalashnikov from Darra. -Photo by author

“Hey, Laghari,” says one of my friends, and as I turn to him, my eyes meet the dark glare of an assault rifle’s barrel. “Boom!” he says, pulling the trigger, and for a second I am almost as good as dead, forgetting that the gun was empty. Perhaps it was the gunshots in the air, which, like the stench of meat at a butcher’s, were adamant on not giving the senses a break. I rest the rifle in my lap, and pick up what was a cup of the tastiest kehva I had ever drunk.

After assault rifles, there were these other rifles they called 12-bores, then there were fancy assault rifles, Tommy Guns, a 50-Cal, if I remember correctly, locally assembled pistols that were replicas of highly admired weaponry around the globe, and bullets from Germany, China, Russia, and our own land of the pure.

I am no financial analyst, nor a business expert. But one visit to that marketplace, and I can safely say It is one of the most flourishing industries of our country. It is certain that the quality with which the Chinese and the Persians manufacture weaponry can be surpassed by this town and the likes of it. An injection of a hefty investment, introduction of modern machinery, legalisation and monitoring of the weapons manufacturing as well as trade, and educating and training of the workers and traders here could lead to the benefiting of the crawling industrial sector of our country. However, sadly, as with the liquor industry, only for the sake of fake dignity, the powerful few, as well as the powerless many, wish to be buying and using the product of these industries to their belching satisfaction, but cannot accept the acceptance of such vital economic motions.

“Sometimes, I sell five to six thousand locally manufactured rifles to a single wholesale customer. Then, there are hunters who love these guns. They are like disposable pieces of weaponry. They [hunters] use them in a season and then they dispose them off,” Muneeb’s friend told us.

Muneeb went on to say: “Most of these hunters are from Afghanistan. They use the guns for hunting and then they go to areas where the Americans [US Army] are nearby. They bury the guns in the ground. After that, they call the Americans and tell them that they have found the Taliban’s buried weapons. The Americans show up, dig the weapons out, reward the informant, and destroy the already useless rifles.”

Some Afghans only buy locally assembled AK47s that cannot fire a single shot. They do that for the same business of fooling the Americans. “Most of the Americans know nothing about weaponry. They cannot tell the difference between a working assault rifle and a fake one,” Muneeb’s relative Shaheer who quit his job in Korea to be part of this industry says, followed by a peculiar laugh that expresses his command on the subject. It ignites a discussion on the comparison between the Americans and the Russians. “Rusee (Russians) were men of courage. Every Rusee soldier fought till his last breath,” said Muneeb. “Americans are such babies they cannot fight without their diapers. If not for the technology, they would fall prey to Taliban’s guerrilla warfare within days,” he continued. I wondered about what is true and what is not.

The discussion goes on. As men with assault rifles in their laps and pistols in hands discuss war and fighting, I, for one, sense something beautiful about the weather there. We were still at the mercy of the electricity providers and our air conditioners in Islamabad. Mostly sweating like pigs during the power cuts no matter what time of the day it was. However, on a shiny, sunny afternoon, when Islamabad must have been making anyone without air-con feel disgusting, the sun was kind in Darra. It was only then that I felt the urge to get up and out, and take a walk. Taking the main host out of the shop, I hatched a little conspiracy of shortening discussions and making everyone move to the hujra. Someone asked, “How will we all fit in the car?” “I will walk,” I said. Muneeb agreed to accompany me. So did two other friends of mine.

In the echo of gunshots, one could still hear footsteps of almost every man passing by. Once you get out of the market area, you can see the real Darra: the beautiful green hills pregnant with hopes of soothing green for the eyes in an appropriate season, children playing, youngsters in school uniforms having group conversations, people working on patches of land, caring for their cattle, flowers dancing in the breeze … Ah, the breeze! It was astounding to feel no smell of gunpowder in it.

Muneeb pointed to me where their coal mines were located in the hills. “Coal is a blessing for us,” he said. I noticed he had not let that smile vanish since we met. “Like guns,” I replied. His smile widened. He also pointed out the military check-posts atop the hills. “Because of these check-posts, we cannot fire trial shots in the air anymore.” I wondered if that was the only tragedy in the context.

The old and the young workers at the factory. -Photo by author

The old and the young workers at the factory. -Photo by author

Before we could sit at the hujra, Muneed took us for a tour of his arms factory where young and old men were working separately in their workshops, manufacturing rifles and pistols. I, for one, could not distinguish if the sounds of saws cutting through wood and metal being sharpened was the sound of guns being manufactured or that of the construction of their economic shelter. Muneeb had us meet his technical caretaker of the factory, a man from Punjab. He had been working there for 27 years. “We have given him our agency’s visa. He is our resident now,” Muneeb told me when we left his caretaker’s room where he was polishing newly manufactured rifles. Explaining the rate of production, Muneeb told me, “We manufacture 55 guns a day in our little factory.” It was not a bad rate for an installation where every section only had a single unit. As we went on with our tour of the factory, I heard a bell toll rapidly and in continuity for some seconds. It was a familiar sound. After the sound stopped, some bell from the past tolled in my mind. “Was that a school bell?” I asked my friend. He nodded in agreement, with surprise shining in his eyes. Behind the factory, with almost no wall to separate the two structures, was the City Public School for Boys. Students would actually pass through the factory to the school.

City Public School. -Photo by author

At the hujra, food was brought for us from their home. We feasted on chapli kebabs, chargha and rice, accompanied with special bread their women cook. “Taste the bread and tell me how fresh it is.” one of Muneeb’s relatives told me. It was fresh. Not warm, but really fresh. “It was cooked early morning,” he explained with a sense of pride. After the meal, there were rounds of the same kehva. I am not sure but I think I took at least a dozen cups of it that day.

We took a walk after the heavy dinner. In the later part of the afternoon now, the town looked as soothing as it could. Nature’s rhythm was now gradually coming to a halt as pauses between gunshots widened to minutes from seconds. There were more smiles on the one and only street of the town than before. Passing the patches of land, my eyes could not stop looking at the place where yellow flowers could be seen greeting the passersby. Ignorant of all else that existed around them, two butterflies fluttered about this accidental garden. I could not help but smile at the thought that this was the most ironic scene I had witnessed at a place where in comparison of seeds being sown into the soil, more metal was bulleted into its womb.