It all happened in the space of a year. About two and a half years ago, I lost my first bag at gun-point outside a close friend’s house in Lahore’s Township area. A little after 8pm -- it was the scheduled load-shedding hour in that neighbourhood.

As me and my husband got out of the car, two men on motorbike came from behind, took out a gun and asked for my husband’s phone and my bag. We quietly relented, and they disappeared in what seemed like seconds.

The bag had all my important cards and some currency that I had drawn from the bank that day. But it was the shock of having survived a gun-point robbery that kept us awake all night.

Next morning, I got a call from somebody at the Township police station, asking me if I had lost a bag. I told him I did. He asked me to list down all the things in the bag. He then told me that he had my bag, and that he had got my cell number from the visiting card that was lying in the bag.

Truth is that it was too humongous a bag for any criminal on motorbike to carry for long. So the two men, in all likelihood, stopped at the next open space, took the currency out and threw the bag away. The security guard who saw it at the first crack of light handed it over to the police.

Getting the bag back from the police station was nothing short of a hassle. With a friend’s help, I had it by the afternoon. It had all the cards intact -- and also my passport that I had completely forgotten about.

A few months later, I left my handbag in a rickshaw on my way back home from work. It was an early winter afternoon. Interestingly, I didn’t even realise it till an hour later when I needed something from the bag.

As I ran around, utterly helpless on how to find the bearded rickshaw driver (the kind of whom there are a plenty in the city!), I got a call on my cell phone from an unidentified number. A man was asking me if I had lost a bag. He asked for other details about the bag and told me he was calling from Sadiq Plaza on the Mall.

Turned out that one of his clients who was coming from outside Lahore had taken the same rickshaw and found the bag inside.

When I reached his office in a shady-looking upper floor of Sadiq Plaza to collect my bag, the gentleman said his client who was sitting next to him and the rickshaw driver had had a big argument about who should keep the bag. Eventually, the client won the argument. The two men then opened the bag, found my CNIC, matched the name with my visiting card, and called me.

They were in no hurry to return the bag. Instead, they emptied it on the table in front of me, taking out one thing after another. Till that point, I was pretty excited about getting the bag without losing anything.

But then I got a little unnerved by how they had touched all my things, as if it was their right.

The Plaza man asked me how I could forget the twenty or so dollar notes that were in my wallet.

I did lose some privacy in those moments, I thought.

They took their time before I got it back and thanked them profusely.

A few months later, I had to take this day trip to Islamabad to get visas for myself and children on the intercity Daewoo bus. It was already 9pm when I landed back in Lahore.

Alighting from the bus, I came out on the darkly road, looking all around for the car that had come to pick me. I was holding a bag that had both a laptop and passports, on my right shoulder. The road was unusually dark for a place like that. Suddenly, a man on a motorbike from behind tried to snatch the bag off my shoulder. The bike kept moving while I held on to the bag, the split-second brain signal telling me I shouldn’t part with it.

I dragged along the bike, fell on the road, rolled over, yet holding tight on the bag… and then the disconnection. The man on the bike disappeared. I got some really bad bruises on arms and legs but mercifully no fracture.

There I was, proud to have saved yet another bag, this time miraculously and by no accident. Or, perhaps a minor one.

Now when I look back at that ‘eventful’ year of my life, the retrieved bags seem to have introduced another side of city that I was unfamiliar with till then.