Lahore does not sleep; it simply changes its jewels. By day, the sun bakes the red brick of the British-era buildings on The Mall, and the city wears the respectable, faded gold of its history. But as dusk bleeds into the smog-orange night, a different Lahore emerges, one that glitters with transactional desire.
In the back of a silent, air-conditioned Uber, Alina watched this transformation through her window. She was a curator of these twilight hours. To the driver, she was just another elegantly dressed woman, perhaps a model or a TV host, being ferried from one upscale locality to another. The black clutch in her lap contained her tools: a lipstick, a money clip of crisp five-thousand-rupee notes, and a phone that buzzed not with messages from friends, but with coordinates for the night’s performance.
She was what the discreet agencies called a “companion.” The clients, usually older, powerful men dripping with the confidence that comes from never hearing ‘no’, preferred the term “High Profile Call Girls In Lahore.” It sounded more respectable, less crude than the reality it described. It implied a brand, an exclusivity. And exclusivity was everything.
Her destination tonight was a penthouse apartment overlooking the lush, dark expanse of the Racecourse Park. The client was a real estate tycoon, a man whose name was often in the business pages, his face smiling piously at charity events. Alina had been briefed: he liked conversation about Russian literature, appreciated a woman who could discuss Chekov without stumbling, and preferred silence after a certain point.
The elevator opened directly into the apartment, a marvel of marble and glass. The man, Amir, was exactly as she expected: impeccably dressed in a shalwar kameez, a faint scent of expensive oudh surrounding him. He offered her a glass of single malt, not the usual local whisky, and for an hour, they played their parts flawlessly. They spoke of The Cherry Orchard, of the irony of longing for something you are actively destroying. The metaphor hung in the air between them, thick and unacknowledged.
This was the first layer of her work: the intellectual seduction. It was what separated her from the common streetwalker, what justified the astronomical sum being transferred to her agency. She was not just a body; she was an experience, a mirror. These men did not pay for sex alone; they paid for the illusion of being understood by a beautiful, intelligent woman who asked for nothing but the cheque.
Later, as he slept, Alina stood by the floor-to-ceiling window. Below her, the city lights twinkled like a field of fallen stars. From this height, Lahore looked peaceful, beautiful even. She thought of her other life, in a modest but clean apartment in Gulberg, where her mother believed she worked the night shift as a translator for a foreign NGO. The lie was a shield, carefully constructed and maintained. The money she earned built that shield, paid for her mother’s medication, her younger sister’s university fees in Australia.
This was the central paradox of her gilded cage: it was the very thing that kept her family free.
She was not a victim. She had chosen this, eyes wide open, three years ago when the medical bills began to drown them. The power dynamic was complex. In this room, the client held all the obvious power—the wealth, the social standing. But Alina held a power they never considered: the power of perception. She saw them not as titans of industry, but as lonely, often sad, boys trapped in aging bodies. They sought from her a temporary escape from the gilded prisons of their own making—their miserable marriages, their relentless business pressures, the isolating weight of their wealth.
The ‘high-profile’ part of her title was a joke she shared only with the other girls. It didn’t mean they were famous; it meant their clients were. And with that came a different kind of risk. Not the risk of the street, of violence or police raids, but the risk of a snapped photo, a hidden camera, a vengeful wife. Their safety was a clause in a contract, ensured by powerful agencies who knew where all the bodies were buried, quite literally.
As the first hint of dawn tinged the sky a pale grey, she dressed silently. She left the money on the bedside table—a necessary part of the transaction, a signal that the performance was over. The illusion of connection evaporated with the morning light. She was a ghost, slipping out before the city shed its nocturnal skin.
Downstairs, her Uber was waiting. As the car pulled away from the curb, she caught her reflection in the window. The sophisticated woman from the penthouse was gone, replaced by a tired girl with a heavy heart. She was a master of personas, a ghost in the machine of Lahore’s elite, living a life of profound solitude amidst the most intimate of encounters.
She was the secret the city told itself in the dark, a whispered confession that would be forgotten by sunrise, its memory tucked away in the silent, gilded cages that dotted the skyline.
