Agus Cornpipe’s death is recounted through conflicting versions that never resolve into a definitive explanation. The accounts agree that he was shot dead before Scarlet Blush, but disagree about who killed him, how the shooting unfolded, and why he was targeted; the uncertainty itself shapes the story’s treatment of violence and memory.

Background and Motives

Agus Cornpipe and Scarlet Blush had lived as fugitives before settling in a house found for them by Iwan Angsa, who had been Agus’s friend. The couple believed they could finally live without being pursued. Their apparent safety was fragile: one account held that police sought Agus because he had killed a security guard during a burglary, only for the guard to turn out to be an off-duty police officer. Another attributed the pursuit to Scarlet’s wealthy father, who resented her elopement with a thief. The accounts do not establish which explanation, if either, prompted the killing.

Iwan’s later explanation places the death within a wider system in which violence could be commissioned rather than arising only from spontaneous street conflict. He says that businessmen hired the Empty Hand to kill, although its members were often mistaken for ordinary gang members; some had ties to police, and the group was known for using weapons. This context makes paid violence a possibility in the novel’s social world, but it does not identify the perpetrators of Agus’s killing.

Conflicting Accounts of the Shooting

A newspaper account described Agus as armed and fighting back before soldiers shot him. Other versions said that soldiers stormed the house and fired without distinguishing their targets, killing him while he and Scarlet were eating dinner. A further rumor placed the shooting in their bedroom. The account judged most plausible by the people recounting the event was different again: a single sniper waited behind trees and shot Agus when he opened a window.

Despite these differences, every version preserves one fact: Scarlet saw Agus shot to death. The story offers no eyewitness account that can settle the details. Iwan says he was not there, and that no one could know for certain what happened except Scarlet and the men who carried it out. The perpetrators would never tell, while Scarlet would not speak about the event. Her silence leaves the death without a confirmed explanation and prevents rumor from becoming proof.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

When Ajo Kawir asks how Agus really died, Iwan can only distinguish what is known from what is conjecture. Asked why Agus had to be killed, he points to the hostility toward thieves, the police’s unwillingness to deal with them, Agus’s estrangement from his family, and his father-in-law’s indifference to his fate. These remarks suggest several forms of abandonment and pressure, not a verified account of the decision to kill him.

The death also returns indirectly in Ajo’s own history. When Iwan examines Ajo after his sudden loss of erectile function, Gecko refuses to explain that two policemen had entered Scarlet’s house and raped her. The withheld account connects the men’s intrusion into her home with Ajo’s condition, while showing how the event is obscured even among those who know part of it. Later, after leaving Iteung, Ajo hears again in memory the sound of the Tiger’s skull being struck; it overlaps with his wife’s sobbing, joining separate experiences of violence and loss in his consciousness. Across these episodes, the novel makes the consequences of violence recur even when its original circumstances remain unspeakable or unresolved.

Violence as a Social System

Other parts of the story broaden the context without solving Agus’s death. Iwan tells Uncle Bunny that he wants him to kill a man, while later advising Ajo that prison could keep him safe from the Tiger’s men and help extinguish the anger consuming him. At the rubber plantation’s fighting arena, soldiers organize contests between men, including fighters said to have been brought from regions under military operations. These episodes portray violence as something directed, traded, or staged by people with power over its participants. Against that wider pattern, Agus’s killing remains both a private loss witnessed by Scarlet and a public story told in incompatible versions.