Ajo Kawir’s renunciation of violence

Ajo Kawir’s renunciation of violence is the hard-won break in a life organized around fighting, retaliation, and the expectation that a man must answer violence with violence. His refusal is tested by renewed opportunities for revenge, but he does not take them: even as others urge him to kill the policemen who harmed Scarlet Blush, he chooses a peaceful path and makes returning to his family more important than restoring his former identity as a fighter.

From retaliation to refusal

Ajo Kawir’s refusal does not begin as a settled doctrine. Earlier, he argues that if the world is unfair, people should try to make it fair. That conviction drives him to confront Mister Lebe over the Young Widow: he warns Lebe not to bother her again and threatens to return if he does. His intervention is an attempt to oppose exploitation, but it uses the very language of force that will later define the limits he sets for himself.

The same entanglement of justice and violence appears when Ajo Kawir prepares to fight the Tiger. He tells Iteung that the Tiger has to die and that he would die happy if the fight ended that way, because he knows that he loves her and that she loves him. The declaration joins tenderness to a willingness to risk death: violence is still a means of confronting an enemy, but it is also bound to Ajo Kawir’s sense of what he can offer and what he might lose.

Later, when he is told that the Beetle wants to fight him and that he could take another man’s place, Ajo Kawir answers that he does not fight anyone anymore. Pressed with the prediction that he will eventually fight again, he invokes his Bird, which he says will not allow him to fight. The answer gives his refusal a personal, almost bodily language, but the decision is his in practice: he declines the challenge rather than accepting the expectation that an experienced fighter must return to combat.

A life shaped by other people’s violence

The novel sets Ajo Kawir’s choices against a wider order in which violence is organized, protected, and made profitable. The Kalimasada Silat Academy was founded by Kyai Abdul Kadir, a veteran of the twelve-year civil war between the republican army and Islamic rebels. After the conflict, some former guerrillas became robbers or extortionists; soldiers who had captured them could then provide armed protection. Kyai Abdul Kadir tried to redirect his former fighters through self-defense, religious teaching, and practical instruction intended to help them earn a living.

That rehabilitative purpose diminished under the founder’s son. The religion classes and lessons in sewing, cultivation, and managing small-business loans ended, and the academy became a place where students learned how to beat people up and sought courage. This history makes martial skill more than an individual matter: it is passed on within a social landscape where former child soldiers have few ways to live beyond armed service or criminal work.

A related system appears in the soldiers’ informal control of a fighting arena. According to gamblers’ talk, fighters were brought from places where military operations were under way, and surrendered rebels or rioters could still be made to fight for spectators. The arena turns people caught in political conflict into entertainment. Against this background, Ajo Kawir’s later refusal is not simply the withdrawal of one fighter from a contest; it rejects a world that repeatedly treats fighting as both livelihood and obligation.

The chain of blame and the claim of peace

Uncle Bunny presents Ajo Kawir’s impotence as the end of a chain of events for which he accepts indirect responsibility. He says that if he had protected Agus Cornpipe, Agus would not have died; Scarlet Blush would not have lost her sanity; the policemen would not have raped her; and Ajo Kawir and his companions would not have been at her house that night. In Uncle Bunny’s account, that night is what left Ajo Kawir unable to get an erection. Ajo Kawir rejects this explanation as coincidence. The exchange shows that even those trying to understand his condition do not agree on what caused it.

Uncle Bunny later locates the policemen and tells Iteung that their deaths might restore her happiness, while arguing that Ajo Kawir—not a hired killer—should take revenge. The appeal depends on an older equation between vengeance and recovery: the person wronged must personally kill those responsible. Iteung tells him that her husband has chosen a peaceful path. Ajo Kawir has already stated that change plainly when Gecko says they should kill the policemen: he will never kill anyone again, because his life has changed.

The contrast between the two men is sharpened by their shared past. Gecko remembers the night at Scarlet Blush’s house with regret, yet his instinct is still to propose another killing. Ajo Kawir does not deny the past or the harm behind the desire for revenge; he refuses to let it dictate another act. His decision therefore unsettles the logic of retaliation without pretending that the injuries and losses that produced it have disappeared.

The return home

The renunciation becomes most concrete on the road home. Ajo Kawir drives alone in an empty truck along a deserted road bordered by dense teak forest. His wife is due to leave prison that day, and he is unsure whether he dares to see her or their daughter. He stops, drinks water, and addresses the Bird without certainty that it will ever rise again. What matters to him now is that he is going home to see Iteung and that they will raise their daughter together.

That promise gives the peaceful path a destination. Earlier, Ajo Kawir had accepted the possibility of dying in a fight while speaking of his love for Iteung; now he chooses to continue living toward a shared family life. He does not know why the events of his life unfolded as they did, and he declines to seek further explanations from Iwan Angsa, Ki Jempes, or Uncle Bunny. The unresolved questions remain, but he no longer treats their answers—or the Bird’s recovery—as conditions for going home.

The novel thus leaves the renunciation neither as a triumphant cure nor as a simple escape from the past. Ajo Kawir’s choice does not erase the violence that formed his world, undo the harm done to Scarlet Blush, or secure revenge against the policemen. Instead, it changes what he will do next: he refuses another fight, accepts uncertainty about his body, and turns toward Iteung and their daughter. The Bird’s uncertain future stands beside that decision, no longer its measure.