This chapter reflects on the methodological journey of conducting multi-sited ethnographic research in the peri-urban east of Lahore, Pakistan, between 2014 and 2022. Approaching the field as a contested and changing landscape, the study traces how urban expansion reconfigures not only land and ecology but also the social and emotional lives of those who inhabit these spaces. Ethnography here is not treated as a neutral technique, but as a journey shaped by positionality, relationships and ruptures. It is not just the making of genuine connections and learning from knowledge holders but also the path of becoming. Fieldwork unfolded across multiple sites and scales, through oral histories, living alongside communities and attending to the rhythms of their everyday practices for the intimate documentation of their day-to-day lives. These methods enabled the capturing of both visible transformations—land acquisition, ecological degradation and displacement—and invisible ruptures, pillage of intangible assets beyond compensation, loss of trust, dislocation, the erosion of community ties and the loss of safety net. By centring on the lived experiences of peri-urban communities, this chapter argues that methodology is inseparable from politics: to write about peri-urban Lahore is to engage with uneven development, dispossession, the fragile ecologies of survival and the fading echoes of belonging. Ethnography, then, becomes a practice of witnessing, listening and tracing life amid loss that is written into the landscape itself.