Beneath the crimson sun of Lahore, where the Mughal legacy meets the pulsing heart of modern Pakistan, stories unfold in the narrow alleyways and bustling bazaars. In this city of 600-year-old walls, love and longing often travel in disguise. "Escorts," a term as slippery as the monsoon rain on the sandstone forts, refers here not to illicit trade but to the quiet, clandestine lives of those who navigate the city’s social undercurrents with grace, risk, and a touch of defiance.
Consider the case of Samina, a name she chose for herself, not the one her family gave. By day, she is a librarian in a government school, her ink-stained fingers turning pages of Urdu poetry. By night, she slips into a sari—bright as a Bollywood dream—and meets men who crave more than the rigid norms of their marriages. Samina’s “escorting” is a quiet rebellion, a currency of discretion that pays for her younger sister’s medical bills and her mother’s dignity. She speaks in riddles when pressed: “I don’t serve vice; I serve choices.”
Lahore’s “escorts” exist in a moral gray zone, shaped by societal hypocrisy. For middle-class women like Samina, the line between survival and sin blurs as easily as the saffron in a kheer. Her clients are not gangsters but factory owners and junior officers, men who quote Iqbal in teashops but crumble under the weight of unspoken desires. “They want someone who won’t judge,” she says over chai, her eyes scanning the hawker-strewn sidewalks. “They want someone who understands how lonely it is to marry your cousin and never speak of wanting otherwise.”
The city itself is complicit in this quiet economy of secrets. The Wagah border thunders with patriotic pageantry, while just beyond, a discreet agency lists “companion services” for expats. At the Pakistan Museum of Art, a painter’s exhibition might hang a canvas titled The Price of Privacy—a nod to the invisible women who trade their presence for peace. The gallerist, a former chemistry student turned art dealer, shrugs when asked about the piece. “Art is escort work, isn’t it? We curate beauty for people who pay to feel seen.”
But the risks are visceral. In Lahore, where honor is guarded like the diamonds of the Badshahi’s arches, one misstep can collapse a life. Samina’s aunt, once a celebrated ghazal singer, was disowned after a man from the town’s “high society” left a lewd video on his phone. Now she lives in a rented room, humming old songs to herself, her voice a whisper in the traffic’s roar. “They call it a woman’s shame,” she mutters, “but what of the men’s?” Escorts Lahore
Yet there are triumphs too. Malika, 34, once an escort, now runs a catering service for Lahore’s film festival. Her tagine-style spiced lentils feed critics and celebrities, her past buried under a spice jar of secrets. “I didn’t trade one cage for another,” she says. “I built my own.”
In Lahore, escorting is less a vocation than a language spoken in shadows—a dialect of trust, calculated risk, and fleeting intimacy. It is a city that knows how to wear many faces: pious yet passionate, rigid yet resilient. The women in Samina’s world are not heroines or villains; they are survivors, threading their way through a culture that condemns and compels in equal measure.
As the call to prayer echoes from the Wazir Khan Mosque, Samina tucks her earnings into a hidden satchel and walks home, her heels clicking like a Morse code of secrets. Tomorrow, she will return to the library, her sari folded neat in a box. In Lahore, where the past and present collide in alleyways and airwaves, the escort’s life is a testament to the enduring human truth: sometimes, the price of freedom is paid in silence.