Building on this volume’s call to include ‘emotional and sentimental perspectives’ of the urban, this piece intends to highlight women’s ingenuity (or needless burden) in negotiating the unseen, gendered costs to be out and about, and how they manufacture a sense of belonging to the city in the process. With objects of daily use as narrators, this piece explores how women persist in urban spaces despite a constant fear for their safety, and surveillance of their mobility. It depicts how women create and experience their freedom through the opportunities that a city promises (e.g. leisure), even as the city exacts a gendered cost from them (e.g. social curbs on women’s movements, gendered violence). This results in an urban relationship between the female and the city where contrasting sentiments such as fear, joy, anger, excitement, coexist. Think water bottles, safety pins, headphones. Using a POV narrative style, this piece follows one fictional character’s mobility in her city, as observed by the objects she carries. I draw inspiration from two sources—literature on gendered mobility, and my experiences of living in Delhi for more than three and a half decades.