Lahore breathes differently after midnight. The day’s brilliant, chaotic energy—the cacophony of rickshaws, the scent of roasted corn and sizzling kebabs, the vibrant river of humanity flowing down Mall Road—recedes. It leaves behind a quieter, more contemplative city, where streetlights cast long, lonely shadows and the air cools, carrying the faint, ghostly perfume of night-blooming jasmine.
It is in these hours that Faraz’s taxi becomes something more than a car. It is a confessional on wheels, a tiny, moving bubble of witness. Faraz, a man whose face is a roadmap of his own fifty years in the city, has seen Lahore’s every mood. He has ferried giggling students to late-night cram sessions, grieving families to hospitals, and lovers to secret rendezvous in parks. But there is another fare, another kind of journey, that defines the city’s deepest, most hidden current.
He knows the call when it comes. It’s never a direct address. It’s a whisper from the dispatcher, a code only the drivers on the night shift understand. “A package needs picking up from the Gulberg guesthouse,” or “A visitor is waiting at the Pearl Continental back gate.” The language is sanitized, but the meaning is raw and real. He is to pick up one of Lahore’s shadows.
They are never what you expect. Faraz has learned that clichés are crutches for the unimaginative. He has picked up girls who look like they just stepped out of a university library, their faces fresh with the last, lingering traces of youth, clutching a designer handbag that holds more than just makeup and keys. He has seen others, older, with eyes that hold the weariness of a thousand such nights, their smiles practiced and brittle, a mask glued expertly in place.
They are a fleeting society, a sisterhood of the ephemeral. In the back of his taxi, for the twenty-minute drive to a fortified house in Defence or a sterile, silent hotel room, they allow a crack in the facade. One might stare out the window, her reflection a pale specter superimposed on the glittering storefronts, her thoughts a million miles away. Another might nervously check her phone, the blue light illuminating a face she is trying to forget. Once, a girl softly hummed a old Noor Jehan ghazal, a haunting melody of love and loss that seemed to hang in the air long after she had paid and disappeared into a gilded doorway.
They are not just bodies for rent; they are curators of illusion. They sell a fantasy of connection, a brief, manufactured intimacy in a city that can be crushingly lonely. The men they meet are often not predators, but ghosts themselves—successful, powerful men who, in the sterile opulence of their homes, are hollowed out by isolation. They are not seeking passion, but a momentary reprieve from the silence. Faraz sees this in the brief, formal handshakes, the quick, almost furtive exchange of cash, the way the girl is absorbed into the house, leaving behind only the faint scent of her perfume. Call Girls Lahore
Faraz’s role is to be invisible. He provides the silent, non-judgmental space between two lives. He is the ferryman on this river of secrets, and his taxi is the boat. He never asks questions. He only listens to the hum of the engine, the soft rustle of clothes, the occasional sigh that is heavier than any conversation.
After the drop-off, on the drive back into the waking city, he often thinks of the two Lahores. The one the world sees: the city of gardens, of poets and saints, of Mughal grandeur and bustling bazaars. And the other, the one that lives in the margins and the shadows, fueled by transactions and whispered desires. Both are real. Both are part of the same intricate, beautiful, and broken tapestry.
As the first hint of dawn blushes the sky above the Minar-e-Pakistan, painting the ancient minarets in soft gold, Faraz pulls his taxi over for a cup of strong, sweet chai. The city is about to wake up, to put on its public face once more. The shadows will recede, the illusions will be packed away, and the secrets he carries will settle back into the quiet, humming heart of Lahore, waiting for the night to fall again