There is a power outage at the Sivasamy household that afternoon. His wife has pulled up a charpoy by the back door and is fanning herself. Their grandson has lit a candle inside his room to study. M Sivasamy himself is huffing and puffing, saying, “The heat!”. But their vegetables are not complaining. Seated snugly inside an earthen pot arrangement, they are fresh and fragrant of the earth. Sivasamy, a potter based in Karumathampatti near Coimbatore, built the contraption in 2018, that he calls ‘earthen refrigerator’.
“I was at the wheel one afternoon, chatting with my relatives as I worked, when we came up with the idea,” recalls the 70-year-old, who runs a sprawling earthenware store out of his home. Having worked with clay all his life, Sivasamy was looking for ways to reinvent his craft that seemed to wane in popularity. “All I had to do was tweak an already existing design,” he says.
