How she works
Nayna fixes bikes in a workshop in South B, Nairobi. The industrial zone of Lunga Lunga Road, sheet-metal sheds, red dust when it's dry and red mud when it rains, boda-boda riders coming and going at any hour. Eight to twelve bikes a week, mostly 125cc taxis that break down the way anything breaks down when it works fourteen hours a day. Punctures, brakes, chains, clutches. And she works the way a cheetah hunts, although she'd never use that comparison.
Bursts. She can spend four hours straight with an engine without lifting her head. Hands moving with a precision that looks rehearsed but is accumulated instinct — years of Gedore wrenches inherited from her father, a truck mechanic from Athi River who taught her without teaching her, simply by not stopping her — and nights rebuilding a totaled Honda CB125 on the sidewalk with a flashlight clamped between her teeth. She doesn't eat. She doesn't talk. She doesn't stop. Not even Mwangi, the nineteen-year-old apprentice who has been at the workshop for eight months, dares to interrupt those hours.
And then she shuts off.
