Nayna.

The Nayna mug is a ceramic mug with the portrait of Nayna, the cheetah, printed on the outside and a colored interior. Eleven ounces. For coffee, for tea, for cardamom chai if you want to do it the way they do it in South B, Nairobi, where Nayna has a motorcycle workshop on Lunga Lunga Road.

There's a sound Nayna makes when something goes right. Not voluntary. She can't control it. A low hum that rises from her chest — almost a purr — that appears when an engine starts clean after a difficult repair. Also when a gasket fits on the first try without forcing. Or when the mid-morning light comes through the workshop door on some random Tuesday and there's no emergency waiting outside.

Mwangi, the apprentice who has been at the workshop for eight months, calls it "Nayna's engine." Nineteen years old, quiet, observant. He hasn't told her. Or he has and she didn't react. With Nayna you're never quite sure how much she knows about what's going on around her. The answer, almost always, is: quite a bit more than you'd think.

The portrait on the mug shows Nayna face-on: the black leather biker jacket she bought at Gikomba with the money from her second rebuilt motorcycle, the red polka-dot bandana that belonged to her grandmother Wanjiku, the crown of fresh red flowers she puts on every morning after stopping at Wakulima market. Light blue background. Eleven ounces. A long coffee, a milky tea, or the chai that mama Amina serves her every morning at six forty-five without asking anything.

The mug does what mugs do: hold something hot at home, at your desk, in the kitchen first thing. The portrait is there — the flowers over the leather jacket — and if someone sees it and asks, you can tell them she's a cheetah who fixes motorcycles in Nairobi. Or you can say nothing. That works too.

If you want to know why she wears flowers on her head and grease on her hands, or what happened with the Honda CB125 she rebuilt at night on the sidewalk with a flashlight clamped between her teeth, [Nayna's biography](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/nayna/) tells the whole story. There are [more Animal Kinhood objects](https://www.yagopartal.com/objects/) with other characters from the project.