The 6:40 to Rawalpindi left without me. I watched it go from the wrong platform, boarding pass in hand, and felt the specific panic of a plan coming apart — followed, about thirty seconds later, by something better: relief.
Because a missed train is just permission. Permission to be somewhere you didn’t schedule, with a whole evening you didn’t budget for. So I walked out of the station and into the old city, and let the noise decide the direction.
The best rooms only show up after the last bus.
Getting gloriously lost
The Anarkali bazaar doesn’t have a map that would help you. It has a logic, but it’s the logic of accretion — stalls that grew into other stalls, a copper lane bleeding into a cloth lane bleeding into a lane that is somehow only shoes. I bought tea I didn’t need from a man who insisted I sit while it cooled.
This is the thing we keep coming back to at AWARA: direction without a fixed plan. A compass, not a map. You can know which way is forward and still have no idea what you’ll find there — and that gap, that not-knowing, is the whole point.
What the detour gave back
By the time I found a room it was nearly midnight, above a shop that sold nothing but brass. The owner stamped my little paper notebook like it was a passport. Day 014. Cleared. I slept better than I had in weeks.
The next train would come. It always does. But the bazaar only happened because the first one didn’t wait.