In the heart of Lahore, where the Mughal-era alleys hum with the scent of kadhai and the hum of history, 24-year-old Saba navigates a world where survival often outshouts morality. By day, she’s a barista at a hip café in Gulberg, reciting Rumi alongside cappuccino orders. By night, she becomes “Lailee,” a name borrowed from a Persian queen, guiding clients through Lahore’s labyrinthine nights in a rented Fiat.

Saba’s story begins not in the red-light corners of Canal Road, but in the quiet despair of a rural village. After her father’s death—a farmer crushed under the weight of mounting debts—she migrated to the city with her sister. The sister vanished into a textile factory’s shadows, while Saba, armed with a degree in English literature and a voice like honey, found her way into Lahore’s underground economy. “It’s not what you think,” she says, sipping chai at a dimly lit sidewalk stall. “I’m not selling anything. I’m buying time.”

Her clients are a mosaic of Lahore’s contradictions: a teetotaling professor who quotes Nostalgia by Delmira Aguilera between sips of paan, a Pakistani-American tech billionaire nostalgic for the “simpler days” of his youth, a young groom on the eve of his wedding, seeking absolution—or transgression. Saba treats them all with the same ironic courtesy, reciting Virginia Woolf while gently correcting their lunch break to mean something else.

Yet her truest confidante is the city itself. Lahore’s nights, she says, are alive with duality. The same streets where chowkidars shout Quranic verses also cradle whispered transactions beneath mango trees. She knows the city’s pulse—when to duck past the police barricades on M.A. Jinnah Road, where to find the last slice of gulab jamun at 2 a.m., how to read the constellations of neon lights as a map of safety and peril. Escorts Lahore 

One evening, she picks up Arman, a journalist known for his scathing editorials on corruption. He asks her to skip the usual routine. Instead, they drive to the outskirts of the city, where the River Ravi glistens like shattered glass. “I need someone who understands Lahore’s lies,” he admits, staring at the water. “My sources keep disappearing. I’m running out of stories.” Saba, recognizing a kindred spirit, tells him about the women in her building—single mothers, divorcees, even a former maa (mistress) to a senator—who’ve all carved out lives in the margins. “This city,” she says, “is built on silence. Our job is to keep it breathing.”

By dawn, Saba is back at the café, wiping milk foam from counters, her eyes shadowed but alert. She receives a text from a new client: “Are you real?” She replies, “Real enough to serve you tea while your wife sleeps.”

In Lahore, where morality is as fluid as the Chenab River and every alley holds a secret, Saba’s story is not one of sin, but of survival—a testament to the invisible labor that keeps cities alive. Her Fiat, decorated with stickers of Sufi poetry, becomes a mobile sanctuary, a space where the desperate and the curious confront their truths.

Some nights, she dreams of the sister she left behind. In the dream, they’re walking through the illuminated corridors of the Wazir Khan Mosque, their shadows dancing on marble walls. “We are light,” Saba whispers to the air. “Even when the world sees only the shadows.”

And in that fragile balance between visibility and obscurity, Lahore—and its keepers—continue, defiantly, to exist.