In the quiet lanes of Lalgudi, where the river Kollidam flowed past the old banyan tree and the railway station announced the arrival of the Madras Mail with a familiar whistle, there lived a carpenter named Krishnan. He was a thin man with spectacles that sat low on his nose, and his workshop behind the Market Road was no bigger than a cowshed. Yet from that small place came chairs, tables, and doors of such simple grace that people said, “Anyone could have made them.”
Krishnan rose before dawn. He selected each piece of teak with care, planed it slowly, measured twice, and fitted the joints so that they held without a single nail showing. Years had gone into learning how a chair should sit lightly on the floor, how a table should invite conversation rather than dominate a room. When a customer carried home one of his pieces, he would look at it and remark, “How simple it is! A child could have done this.” Krishnan only smiled and returned to his work.
One afternoon a young man named Raju appeared at the workshop door. He had failed in his college examinations and decided, as many do in Lalgudi, that craft was easier than books. “I shall make furniture too,” he announced. “It looks simple enough.”
Krishnan gave him a corner of the shed and a few tools. Raju worked with great energy but little patience. He cut corners, mixed woods of different strengths, and added extra carvings wherever he felt the design needed “interest.” The chairs he produced had complicated legs that wobbled, tables with drawers that refused to open, and cupboards whose doors never quite met. Customers who tried them frowned and said, “How complex! How difficult to live with!”
Raju grew frustrated. “I work hard,” he complained to Krishnan one evening, “yet my things come out complicated and no one wants them. Yours look so easy.”
Krishnan put down his plane and wiped his hands on a piece of old cloth. “Simple is hard, my boy,” he said in the gentle tone of a man who had learned the truth slowly. “When you put in the long hours, the careful thought, the quiet corrections no one sees, the work becomes simple for the person who uses it. When you work lightly, or hurry, or try to impress, the result grows complex and difficult. The world consumes the simple thing easily and never notices the labour behind it. Complex is easy—anyone can make a tangle. Simple takes a lifetime.”
Raju listened, as young men in Lalgudi sometimes do when the older voice is soft enough. He stayed on in the workshop. The days lengthened into months. He learned to leave out what was unnecessary, to measure twice, to sit with a piece of wood until it told him what shape it wished to take. Slowly his chairs began to rest firmly on the floor. People who bought them said, once again, “How simple!”
And Krishnan, hearing them, only smiled and returned to his quiet labour, knowing that the hardest thing in the world is to make something look as if it had cost no effort at all.