“Send someone to Krakatoa Crater”

“Send someone to Krakatoa Crater” names Uncle Bunny’s offer to dispose of people through hired violence. Its recurrence ties his criminal methods to Ajo Kawir’s past and, more importantly, makes Ajo Kawir’s refusals a measure of his change: people once treated as targets become people he will not send away or kill.

Meaning and Use

Uncle Bunny uses the phrase when discussing two policemen whom he describes as corrupt and whom he says he can locate. He offers to send them to Krakatoa Crater and help Ajo Kawir, framing the proposed killing as a practical service. Ajo Kawir thanks him but says there is no point and tells him to leave them alone. The exchange establishes the expression’s function: it is not merely a reference to a place, but a euphemistic offer of lethal retribution.

The phrase recurs in Uncle Bunny’s account of a middle-aged woman at a yarn factory. She has refused to work for successively longer periods and persuaded more than a thousand workers to join her strike. Uncle Bunny asks whether Ajo Kawir wants to send her to Krakatoa Crater, though he does not own the factory himself. Ajo Kawir refuses, making clear that he has no desire to have her sent there. The proposal extends the expression beyond personal revenge: Uncle Bunny can imagine the same violent solution being applied to collective labor protest.

Ajo Kawir’s Refusals

The contrast between Uncle Bunny’s readiness and Ajo Kawir’s restraint sharpens later, when Gecko gives Ajo Kawir a photograph of his daughter. The girl has grown, and her handwritten message asks when her father will come home and says that she and her grandparents want to see him. Ajo Kawir’s eyes fill with tears. When he hears that Uncle Bunny has found the two policemen, he says they should be killed; but he immediately refuses to carry out that revenge himself, declaring that he will never kill anyone again because his life has changed.

The exchange turns the offer associated with Krakatoa Crater into a test of whether Ajo Kawir will return to his former violence. Uncle Bunny has supplied the practical means to act, and the policemen are no longer beyond reach. Yet Ajo Kawir’s answer is not a complaint that revenge is impossible. It is a rejection of killing as part of the life he now intends to lead. Gecko recognizes the change as a path of tranquility and peace, linking it to Ajo Kawir’s “bird,” which had remained asleep.

Revenge and the Limits of Substitution

Uncle Bunny later gives Iteung photographs of the policemen and argues that Ajo Kawir’s refusal leaves his revenge unfinished. In his view, Iteung could arrange their deaths, but that would not substitute for Ajo Kawir killing them himself: he believes the revenge belongs to the person who holds the grudge, and connects its completion to the possibility that Ajo Kawir’s bird might wake. He therefore asks Iteung to convince her husband to kill the men.

Iteung points out that Ajo Kawir has chosen peace. Uncle Bunny nevertheless treats killing as a route to restored happiness, even while acknowledging that the bird might not awaken. His proposal exposes a conflict in the phrase’s logic: violence can be commissioned and carried out by others, but Uncle Bunny insists that the emotional and bodily meaning of vengeance cannot simply be delegated. The expression therefore gathers two opposed ideas—violence as a service Uncle Bunny can arrange, and revenge as a personal act that he believes only Ajo Kawir can complete.

Narrative Significance

The repeated offer connects a series of distinct targets: the two policemen, blamed for what happened to Scarlet Blush, and the factory worker leading a strike of more than a thousand people. In both cases, Uncle Bunny’s first response is to imagine removal by force; in both, Ajo Kawir refuses. The recurrence makes the phrase a compact marker of the criminal world’s assumption that a problem can be solved by eliminating a person.

Against that assumption, Ajo Kawir’s repeated refusals give the phrase its changing significance. At first it presents violence as available assistance; later, after the policemen have been found, it marks a revenge that remains possible but is no longer acceptable to him. Uncle Bunny continues to regard the offer as useful, while Ajo Kawir’s commitment to peace—and Iteung’s recognition of that choice—places a limit on what the phrase can accomplish. Krakatoa Crater remains the destination proposed by a violent past, not an action Ajo Kawir agrees to take.