Wapda Town is not the Lahore of history, nor the Lahore of bustling, ancient bazaars. It is the Lahore of progress: wide, straight avenues, high security walls, and the monolithic, beige uniformity of planned urban sprawl. It is a place built fundamentally on the promise of respectability, where the aspirations of the rising middle and upper-middle classes are housed in neat, often guarded, blocks.
Yet, in a city of twenty million, respectability is often a carefully constructed facade, and the anonymity offered by these modern planned communities inadvertently creates fertile ground for economies that thrive away from public scrutiny. Wapda Town, in its quiet, sprawling efficiency, becomes a backdrop for a quiet commerce that relies entirely on discretion—the realm of transactional intimacy, accessed not through back alleys, but through the shielded glow of a smartphone screen.
The Geography of Discretion
The traditional geography of sex work—the visible red light area, the street corner solicitation—struggles to survive in the hyper-policed and digitally connected landscape of 21st-century Lahore. Instead, the market has migrated to the digital space, turning physical locales like Wapda Town into mere rendezvous points.
Here, the escort economy is a function of infrastructure. It relies on the widespread availability of ride-sharing services, which guarantee quick, traceless transit; on the sealed-off privacy of high-rise apartment complexes or anonymous short-term rentals; and on the sheer volume of traffic that makes any single car or person disappear into the flow.
The transactions are initiated on secured apps, vetted through chat forums, and finalized with the cold precision of a business arrangement. The women (and sometimes men) who participate in this shadow economy are not easily identifiable. They blend seamlessly into the clientele of the nearby high-end coffee shops, the students moving between coaching centers, or the young professionals hurrying home. This invisibility is their greatest asset and the most defining characteristic of the modern escort service in areas like Wapda Town.
