A shave given while the king still slept

The royal barber's single daily duty was to attend King Krishnadevaraya each morning and shave him before the business of the court began, a task he performed with real skill and had done for years without particular incident, until one morning he arrived at the accustomed hour to find the king still deeply asleep, and — rather than wait, or risk being blamed for the delay if he woke him — decided to proceed with the shave exactly as usual, working so lightly and so expertly that Krishnadevaraya slept through the entire procedure without stirring.

A king wakes delighted, and offers anything he likes

When the king finally woke to find himself perfectly shaved and not the faintest memory of the process, he was so genuinely astonished and impressed by the barber's steady hand that he declared, in the expansive mood such small marvels sometimes produce in kings, that the man might ask for whatever reward he liked, and it would be granted.

A barber's ambition outgrows his station

A more modest man might have asked for gold, or land, or simply a permanent place of honor in the royal household, but the barber, made giddy by his own success and by the size of the promise now hanging in the air, asked instead to be appointed a minister of the court — a request the delighted king, still glowing with admiration, granted on the spot without pausing to consider what a barber actually knew about the governing of a kingdom.

Alarm spreads through the council chamber

The news spread through the palace by evening and threw the existing ministers into a genuine panic, since a council seat handed out as a reward for a smooth shave threatened to make a mockery of every year of study and service the rest of them had put into earning their own places, and they came to Tenali Rama — as the court's designated solver of problems too delicate for direct royal correction — asking him to find some way to undo the damage without publicly embarrassing the king who had made the promise.

A test dressed up as an ordinary day's business

Tenali agreed to help, and rather than argue the point directly, arranged instead for the newly appointed barber to be seated among the ministers at the very next council session, where a string of real administrative disputes — questions of taxation, boundary quarrels, the fair division of disputed land — were brought before him one after another for judgment, exactly as they would have been brought before any other minister.

A skilled hand meets an unfamiliar kind of problem

The barber, whose steady hand and years of practice had prepared him beautifully for the razor and not at all for the law, floundered through question after question, offering answers so plainly uninformed that even he could hear how little sense they made as they left his mouth, and grew more mortified with every case until the whole chamber's carefully restrained silence told him everything his own ears had already confirmed.

A graceful retreat, and honor kept on every side

By the session's end the barber himself asked to be released from a post he could now see plainly he was unfit for, and Tenali — having gotten exactly the outcome he wanted without ever having to contradict the king in public — arranged instead for the man to be given a fine house and a generous pension in place of the ministry, so that the king's promise was honored, the council's dignity was preserved, and the barber went home considerably richer and only a little wiser about the difference between a steady hand and a wise head.