Shyam Lal Prajapat

I was eight when my father first let me touch the wheel. It is a stone chaak, waist-high and heavier than a man, and you start it with a bamboo stick and your own shoulder. Ours has been turning in the same courtyard in Jaipur since before I was born.

We work in terracotta — the red clay that comes from the riverbed beyond Amer, which we dig, soak, tread with our feet and rest for a fortnight before it is fit to throw. No machine touches it. A surahi that holds water cool through a Rajasthan summer is not a design; it is forty years of knowing how thin a wall can go before it will not survive the fire.

For a long time I thought this would end with me. Steel and plastic took the water pots, and my sons went to the city for work that pays in the monsoon too. What brought them back was not nostalgia — it was that people began asking again for a cup that is made of earth and goes back to earth.

Now we fire twice a month in the open kiln behind the house, and I teach whoever comes. The wheel does not care who is sitting at it. It only asks that your hands are steady and that you are willing to lose the first thirty pots.