Nayna.

Eight thousand Kenyan shillings. That's what Nayna paid for a 2008 Honda CB125 that was more dead than alive. Bent frame, blown engine, tank pitted with corrosion. It was sold to her by a boda-boda rider called Ochieng — a motorcycle taxi driver — who didn't know what to do with it anymore. Eight thousand shillings was everything Nayna had at that moment. She was twenty. She'd been repairing bikes on the sidewalk for months, without a workshop, without a space, with four wrenches and a screwdriver. The boda-boda drivers in the area paid her in cash, sometimes in kind: a helmet, half a tank of gas, a plate of food.

She didn't always eat every day. But every night she wrote down what she'd earned in a squared notebook.

The CB125 was a bet she had no right to make. But Nayna doesn't think in terms of right. She thinks in terms of: can this be fixed or not. And that bike could be fixed.

That story — the bike, the sidewalk, the flashlight — isn't an ornament. It's the core of what you see in the portrait. Nayna looks like someone who has had to solve problems without help, without a safety net, without anyone telling her whether she was doing it right. Who learned by watching, worked with her hands, and built her own workshop by not giving up and keeping her accounts in a notebook.

Now she's twenty-five and has a workshop on Lunga Lunga Road, South B's industrial zone, Nairobi. It's called NAYNA MOTORS. She fixes eight to twelve bikes a week, mostly boda-boda that break the way anything breaks when it works fourteen hours a day. And every two or three months something better comes along: an old bike to restore, a crash bike she buys at auction. Those projects she works on at the end of the day, when the light is still coming through the door but the customers have left.

In the back of the workshop she has a 1985 Yamaha SR400 she bought at auction. Blown engine, incredible chrome underneath the grime. It's been dismantled for eight months, every part cleaned and photographed. She's in no hurry. It's not for sale. It's the first bike she's restoring just for herself.