Iteung takes revenge on Mr. Toto in a calculated reversal at the Guidance Office, where the teacher once held authority over her. She approaches him as though returning to a familiar relationship, then attacks him when he believes he can resume control. By leaving him exposed in the schoolyard, she makes the private encounter public and turns his position of authority into humiliation. The episode’s central movement is from apparent reunion to retaliation, with Iteung directing both the encounter and its aftermath.

Return to the Guidance Office

The scene begins with Iteung standing at the Guidance Office door. Mr. Toto is surprised to see her and asks where she has been since changing schools; he remarks that she has grown up. His questions frame the meeting as a return to an earlier familiarity. Iteung smiles shyly, enters, and closes the door, while Mr. Toto asks whether she misses him. He says that he does.

Iteung sits beside him, takes his hand, and rests her head on his shoulder. Mr. Toto responds by putting an arm around her. He reads her gestures as encouragement and allows the encounter to proceed on that assumption. The narration makes clear that he misunderstands what is happening: Iteung’s apparent closeness is the means by which she brings him within reach, not evidence that their former relationship has been restored.

The Reversal

As Mr. Toto moves toward her, Iteung acts first. She kicks him and follows with further blows, leaving him unable to escape and unconscious beside the chair. The reversal is abrupt: the man who had taken her return as an invitation discovers that she has set the terms of the encounter and will not let him control it. The scene establishes her response through action rather than an explanation of her intentions.

When Mr. Toto is down, Iteung calmly gathers her own clothes, collects his as well, and leaves the office. Her composure contrasts with the violence of the attack and with Mr. Toto’s confusion. She does not remain to negotiate or explain herself. Instead, she takes charge of what happens next, carrying away the clothing that will allow her to expose him beyond the closed room.

Exposure and Aftermath

Near the school gate, Iteung throws Mr. Toto’s clothes into an old asphalt drum used for burning rubbish. Schoolchildren are leaving class in groups when a teacher comes out of the Guidance Office naked and disoriented. They stop, point, and shout; some are frightened, while others laugh at the unexpected sight. Mr. Toto covers his eyes, apparently unable to face the crowd or the world around him. The public scene is the consequence of Iteung’s decision to take his clothes and discard them: his authority as a teacher is replaced, in front of his pupils, by exposure and helplessness.

The episode closes not with a confrontation between the two characters but with Iteung alone in the bathroom, thinking about Mr. Toto. That ending keeps the aftermath complex: her retaliation has left him publicly humiliated, yet her thoughts turn back to him with desire. The text therefore distinguishes the attack from a simple repudiation of attraction. Her revenge is directed at Mr. Toto and enacted through control of the encounter, while the ending leaves her continuing bodily response unresolved rather than presenting it as a reconciliation.

Retribution and Control

The scene’s structure depends on a sharp gap between what Mr. Toto believes and what Iteung is doing. He interprets her return and gestures as signs of renewed intimacy; she uses that misreading to make the encounter possible on her terms. The school setting then extends the reversal beyond the office: what begins behind a closed door becomes a spectacle witnessed by students. Iteung’s choice to remove and burn the clothing makes exposure part of the retaliation, not an accidental consequence.

Elsewhere, the novel repeatedly places acts of violence beside claims about fairness, protection, and revenge. Ajo Kawir argues that an unfair world should be made fairer; he threatens Mister Lebe to keep him from harming the Young Widow again; and he later tells the girl that he is prepared to die fighting the Tiger because he loves her. Those episodes provide a broader context for retaliation as a way characters try to answer injury, although they do not explain Iteung’s motive in this particular scene. In a separate exchange, Ajo Kawir rejects Uncle Bunny’s attempt to connect his impotence to a chain of events involving Agus Cornpipe, Scarlet Blush, and the police, calling it coincidence. Together, these different accounts of responsibility and reprisal make Iteung’s episode part of a wider pattern in which characters contest who has the power to define an injury and what can count as an answer to it.