The Ramada by Wyndham Karachi Creek is a monument to transience. It doesn’t preside over the old city’s bustling heart but anchors itself in the fluid space between the airport and the new money of DHA, a waystation for those not quite arriving and not quite departing. Its lobby is a study in polished silence, the air smelling of lemongrass disinfectant and chilled ambition.

This is where he waited. Not in the glare of the main lights, but in the plush embrace of an armchair half-hidden by a gigantic faux fern, a strategically chosen stage. He was one of them. An escort. Though he preferred the term ‘temporary companion.’ His name was Zayan, and he possessed the kind of polished, ambiguous beauty that could be molded to fit a client’s fantasy—European businessman, lonely expat, local elite seeking anonymous company.

His phone buzzed, a discreet tremor against his thigh. Room 512. Mr. Aziz.

The elevator was a capsule of mirrored infinity. He adjusted his cufflinks, not because they needed it, but for the performative grace of the gesture. The doors sighed open onto the fifth floor, a carpeted tunnel of identical doors, each one a sealed world of secret wants.

He knocked. Twice. Firm, professional.

The man who opened the door was not what he expected. Not the portly, sweaty-palmed businessman or the brash young heir. Mr. Aziz was perhaps in his late sixties, with a weary, intelligent face and eyes that held a deep, quiet sadness. The suite was orderly, a book of Urdu poetry splayed open on the desk beside a laptop. There was no air of illicit expectation, only a profound, echoing solitude.

“Thank you for coming,” Mr. Aziz said, his voice soft. “Please, come in.”

The usual script evaporated. There was no awkward small talk, no transactional negotiation. Zayan sat, his professional smile feeling brittle and out of place.

“You are probably wondering,” Mr. Aziz began, pouring two glasses of water from a carafe, “why a man my age would call for company.”

“It’s not my place to wonder, sir,” Zayan replied, the well-worn line delivered by rote.

“Perhaps it should be.” Mr. Aziz offered a faint, sad smile. “I am here from Lahore. My wife… she passed away six months ago. This was our hotel. We would come here for a weekend, to get away from the family, to just be us. She loved the view of the creek, the way the city lights looked like fallen stars at night.”

He gestured to the window. The dusty, sprawling landscape of Karachi was gilded by the setting sun.

“The family thinks I’m here for a business meeting. But I suppose I am conducting business. The business of memory.” He looked at Zayan, his gaze direct and unashamed. “I didn’t call for… company. I called for a witness.”

Zayan was silent, his carefully constructed persona disarmed. He was an actor hired for a play that had been cancelled, now asked to just sit in the audience.

“She would order tea to the room at this exact time,” Mr. Aziz continued, as if narrating a story to an old friend. “She’d complain that the biscuits were never quite right, but she’d eat them anyway. We would sit right here, in this silence, and it was the most comfortable sound in the world.”

As if on cue, a soft knock announced room service. A young man wheeled in a trolley with a silver teapot, two cups, and a plate of biscuits. Mr. Aziz had ordered it before Zayan had even arrived.

For the next two hours, Zayan simply listened. He drank lukewarm tea and ate slightly stale biscuits as Mr. Aziz spoke of a love that was built over forty years—of arguments in markets, of raising children, of silent understandings, of a shared life that had been his entire world. He wasn’t weeping; he was archiving. He was speaking his memories into the quiet, anonymous space of the hotel room, entrusting them to a stranger because it was too painful to share them with those who knew her.

Zayan, whose profession was built on the artifice of intimacy, was suddenly immersed in the raw, unvarnished truth of it. He was not a fantasy. He was a priest in a secular confessional, a mirror for a grief too vast to be held by one man alone.