Look first
Nayna learned mechanics without anyone teaching her. Her father repaired trucks on the A109, the road connecting Nairobi to Mombasa, and she used to sit next to him after school. She didn't ask questions. She didn't ask for explanations. She just stayed there, handing him wrenches before he asked for them, watching how her father's hands moved under the chassis.
By ten she could tell a diesel from a petrol engine just from the sound of the ignition. She hadn't studied it. She'd heard it hundreds of times, sitting in the dust of Athi River, the town southeast of Nairobi where she grew up, with the sound of trucks in the background and the smell of diesel floating in the hot midafternoon air. Her mother sewed in a textile factory. Her grandmother Wanjiku sold chai from a tin stall next to Syokimau station. Nayna absorbed everything without a filter: engines, fabric, cardamom, road dust.
What she learned in those years wasn't mechanics. It was a method. Look first. Listen. Let the machine tell you what's wrong before putting your hand in. At fourteen, a tanker truck crushed her father's left foot. He didn't lose it, but he could no longer work under a chassis. The tools sat idle in a box. Nayna was fifteen when she started using them to fix neighborhood bicycles. At sixteen, boda-boda bikes. The drivers of those 125cc motorcycle taxis that move half of Nairobi paid her in cash, sometimes in kind: a helmet, half a tank of petrol, a plate of food.
