Uncle Bunny

Uncle Bunny is a Jakarta-based power broker whose protection and influence reach into the lives of Iwan Angsa, Ajo Kawir, and Iteung. He has spent years directing violence and shielding selected people from its consequences; later, confronted with the lasting effects of that history, he tries to protect Ajo and help the couple find happiness. His arc turns on the gap between being able to arrange events and being able to undo them.

Identity and Methods

Uncle Bunny arrives in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, Adidas sneakers, and dark sunglasses, accompanied by a driver who looks and behaves like a bodyguard. He introduces himself by name and offers Ajo a cigar, which Ajo declines in favor of his usual cloves. The details present a composed, well-resourced visitor whose easy manner sits alongside an ability to reach people and places far beyond the village.

That reach is apparent when Uncle Bunny knows that Ajo cut off Mister Lebe’s ear. Rather than treating the injury as a local secret, he explains that information finds its way to him. He uses this knowledge to assess Ajo and make a proposition: eliminate the Tiger without leaving a trace, with the imagined destination of Krakatoa Crater standing for the completeness of the disappearance. The job carries substantial money, and Ajo, unused to such an offer, is excited enough that his hands shake.

Protection, Debt, and Violence

Uncle Bunny’s connection to Iwan Angsa rests on a long history of intervention. Iwan and Agus Cornpipe had robbed a general’s nephew and blinded him; after they were imprisoned and remained targets, Uncle Bunny used his acquaintance with the general to secure their release. He then directed Iwan to kill a policeman who kept coming to his factory and sent him away to travel. Iwan later returned home, married, and reformed, but Uncle Bunny still expects him to find someone for the Tiger business. Iwan understands the debt and the protection Uncle Bunny provided, yet refuses to fight again himself.

The Tiger assignment exposes the limits of that old loyalty. Iwan says he wants Ajo to kill the Tiger, while recognizing the danger of allowing the Tiger or someone acting on his behalf to kill Ajo. Ajo’s own reasons are tangled with his unresolved attachment to Iteung and his belief that death would end the suffering associated with his inability to get an erection. Uncle Bunny’s offer therefore recruits him not merely for a paid fight, but into a world where personal despair, masculine reputation, and other people’s business are made to converge.

Uncle Bunny has also depended on protection as a practical limit rather than an absolute promise. He explains that he could not save Agus Cornpipe after Agus refused to apologize for sleeping with another man’s mistress. Ajo later accuses him of letting Agus die. Uncle Bunny is peeved, but concedes the substance of the accusation: he had protected many criminals, yet others wanted Agus dead, and he could not protect everyone. The distinction matters to Uncle Bunny, but it cannot separate his past choices from the chain of events that followed.

Ajo’s Imprisonment and the Academy’s History

After Ajo is beaten in prison, Uncle Bunny argues against his trying to escape or being caught by the Tiger’s men on the street. He proposes that Ajo turn himself in and serve a limited term—he suggests ten years—as a safer alternative to remaining exposed. He also presents prison as a place where the anger consuming Ajo might subside. The proposal is another effort to manage danger through intervention, but it comes after the violence has already narrowed Ajo’s choices.

Uncle Bunny’s interventions sit within a broader history of armed power and precarious protection. The Kalimasada Silat Academy was founded by Kyai Abdul Kadir, a veteran commander in the twelve-year civil war between the republican army and Islamic rebels. After the rebellion collapsed, some former fighters were executed or jailed; others returned to a changed world without work or housing and became robbers, thieves, or market extortionists. Soldiers who had captured them sometimes protected them in turn, using their manpower to preserve—or disrupt—the peace. Uncle Bunny’s own accounts of protection and political violence belong to a novel that shows how such relationships can outlast the conflict that formed them.

Kyai Abdul Kadir founded the academy to rehabilitate former child soldiers, offering self-defense, religious teaching, and practical skills such as sewing, cultivation, and managing loans. His son later removed the religious classes and the instruction meant to help students earn a living, leaving a conventional fighting school. Elsewhere, soldiers informally control the Rubber Plantation Fighting Pit and bring fighters from areas including Aceh, Papua, and Ambon, sometimes forcing surrendered rebels or rioters to fight for gamblers. Uncle Bunny is not identified as the owner of either institution, but their histories clarify the environment in which violence is organized, protection is conditional, and men are pushed toward fighting as a livelihood.

Responsibility and Attempted Repair

Uncle Bunny eventually tells Ajo that he believes he helped make him unable to get an erection. He traces the chain back through his failure to protect Agus Cornpipe: Agus’s death was followed by Scarlet Blush’s mental illness, the rape of Scarlet Blush by two police officers, and the events that brought Ajo to the house that night. Uncle Bunny’s claim is not that he directly caused each event, but that his own earlier failure formed part of the sequence. He names a responsibility that his customary role as protector had allowed him to deflect.

His account of himself is stark. He says that he has lived through war, servants leaving, the massacre of communists, the killing of East Timorese freedom fighters, and even the indignity of being urinated on by a dog, yet nothing has burdened his thoughts as much as Ajo and Iteung. He says he wants both of them, and their children and grandchildren, to be happy, and fears that only a year or two may remain to him. The confession does not erase his history; it shows an old man measuring a life of intervention by the damage he can no longer reverse.

Uncle Bunny later gives Iteung photographs of the two policemen who raped Scarlet Blush and tells her that Ajo knows who they are. Ajo has changed: prison and his experience of impotence have led him to reject killing and fighting. Uncle Bunny could have the policemen killed through someone else, but refuses to do so on Ajo’s behalf. In his view, the grievance belongs to Ajo, and only Ajo’s own revenge could restore his lost sexual potency. His reasoning still treats violence as a possible instrument of repair, even as Ajo’s refusal marks a break with the system Uncle Bunny has long used.

Narrative Significance

Uncle Bunny’s role is defined by the double meaning of protection. He frees Iwan and Agus from prison, gives Iwan a direction, recruits Ajo for a dangerous job, and later seeks a safer path for him. Yet protection depends on choices about whom to save, and Uncle Bunny admits that he could not save Agus when other forces demanded his death. His influence can redirect violence, but it cannot guarantee that violence will stop at the boundaries he sets.

That limitation becomes clearest in the final conflict over revenge. Uncle Bunny believes Ajo’s bird can awaken only if Ajo kills the policemen; Ajo no longer wants to kill anyone. The disagreement brings the novel’s links between virility, toughness, and violence into focus without resolving them on Uncle Bunny’s terms. His attempt to repair the past is sincere, but it remains shaped by the same logic that once made violence a tool of protection and obligation.