The wrenches
The Nayna tote bag, with Nairobi's cheetah, has her portrait printed on one side: the black biker jacket, the red polka-dot bandana from her grandmother, the crown of flowers. It's a bag with long handles for carrying over the shoulder, and it holds what a tote usually holds: the day's stuff.
In Nayna's workshop, on Lunga Lunga Road in the industrial area of South B, there's a wooden panel with tools hanging on it. Every tool has its marked spot. Nayna knows if someone has touched anything just by looking at the panel when she arrives in the morning — at six fifteen, after buying flowers at Wakulima market and having chai at mama Amina's stall. But the tools that matter most aren't on the panel. They're in a metal box under the workbench: a set of old Gedore fixed wrenches, with her father's marks of use beneath her own.
Her father repaired trucks on the Nairobi-Mombasa road, the A109. Before the accident — a tanker truck ran over his left foot when Nayna was fourteen — those Gedore wrenches were his. After that he couldn't work under a chassis anymore. The tools stayed at home. Nayna started using them on neighborhood bicycles, then on boda-boda bikes. She took them to Nairobi when she left at eighteen. She used them in Kamau's workshop, the man who deducted 3,000 shillings for a wrench he'd put in his own drawer. She used them on the sidewalk, repairing bikes without a roof and with four tools, during the three worst months. And she still uses them now, every day, in her own workshop.
