Heading south
On Sundays when Nayna doesn't work — and those are few — she does something that seems almost unbelievable to anyone who knows her from the workshop: she doesn't touch a tool all day. She takes the CB125, the Honda she rebuilt herself with a flashlight between her teeth at twenty, and drives south. Past Syokimau, where she lives, one room on a third floor with no elevator. Past Athi River, where she was born, where her father still sits in the doorway watching trucks go by on the A109. Past the gas station. And at some point, the road stops being road and becomes dirt.
The Kitengela plains have nothing. Short grass, spaced acacias, a sky that opens in every direction. Sometimes zebras. Sometimes nothing at all. Nayna parks the bike, sits on the ground and looks. An hour. Two. She doesn't think about the workshop or the rent or the 1985 Yamaha SR400 that's been dismantled in the back room for eight months. She doesn't think. And that, for someone who works in four-hour bursts without lifting her head, is the closest thing she has to actual rest.
There's something in that horizon that resembles how she works: a lot of empty space, and when something moves, everything focuses on one point. Cheetahs hunt that way, although Nayna would never use that comparison. What she would say, if you asked, is that she needs to see far away every now and then. That the workshop on Lunga Lunga Road has walls a meter and a half away and some days that gets heavy. And that the plains are free.







