It’s evening in Lahore and traffic around the Mini Market roundabout isn’t as bad as it usually is, but it’s still fairly horrendous. The sunset offers nothing spectacular, and so I pretend to use my phone to appear busy, all the while avoiding an awkward conservation with the cab driver.

We’re not stuck for long, though. Slowly, all the vehicles, including ours, trickle into the stretch of tarmac I love more than any other: the MM Alam Road.

I ask the driver to stop at the restaurant at the near end.  It’s housed in a dingy plaza and if you didn’t know about the place, you probably would never give it a second glance. Especially on the modern MM Alam Road, with electronic billboards and blaring restaurant signs, the eatery stands out -- even though it makes no attempt to stand out -- as a true relic of the past, a relic that continues to be savoured.

I stop the driver from ending my ride just yet, all too aware of my friends’ lack of punctuality. As much as we’ve grown over the past few years, through school and now college, I know they’re still just as unpunctual and I’m just as scared of sitting at the restaurant alone.

"I’ll be there in 5 minutes," replies one of my friends through text.

Knowing that his five minutes translates to roughly 25 minutes of normal human time, I ask the cab driver to pull around the road.

I’ve been away from Lahore for a while, at university, and so I want to reacquaint myself with the place I frequented most in my school years.

The traffic flows more smoothly than what I expect, at this time of the day. As we drive past the ever-rising plazas and the aesthetically pleasing restaurant buildings, I ignore the multiple shops/food places that appear rundown or closed altogether. In fact, it’s not until the driver points at an abandoned café, where he used to work, that I start to register the details. He uses it as an excuse to go off on a rant about the new mega-malls in the city, citing their opening as the reason for MM Alam’s supposed decline.

I shrug it off. No mall, even with their fancy escalators, can take away anything from the MM Alam road, I reassure myself.

But as we drive further down the road, I see quite a few places, which formed an integral part of my childhood, either not there at all or with little business to show. The fact that it’s a Friday night only adds to my disappointment. I let out a genuine squeal when I see the iconic Pizza Hut on the road closed. I am comforted, minutes later, by the sight of its new location, but my heart aches, nonetheless.

Even the aunties that used to flog the many overly priced clothing outlets in the vicinity seem to have abandoned the road. I almost long for the distinct sight of profound materialism and pretentiousness that they used to embody, hoarding a dozen or so shopping bags or being chauffeured by their drivers. It never comes.

Maybe I am just exaggerating the entire ordeal. Maybe I am trying to convince myself that I have grown up and my childhood is slowly but surely slipping away from my hands, and so I am looking out for these absences and obsessing over them.

I don’t have the statistics, but perhaps MM Alam is still thriving as it has for the past decade, a decade that saw many restaurants/shops go out of business only for new ones to take their place.

It would be utterly naïve to discount the impact of the new air-conditioned malls in Lahore. It is true that a lot of people now choose to go to these malls over traditional shopping centres/food streets -- these are more convenient, offer better parking, and you don’t have to deal with problems like power outage or the torrential monsoon downpours. They’re just better in every way, but I don’t want to admit that.

Having circled back to the restaurant and wasted 10 minutes in the process, I decide I would rather deal with my social awkwardness than rack up an even higher taxi fare. I ask the driver to stop at the restaurant. I pay and then step out onto the footpath.

The wind has suddenly picked up. The smell of the rain from the day before still lingers. I stare at the buildings lined up along the road till my eyes can see, take a deep breath and worry about asking the manager for a table for six.