Ajo Kawir and Iteung's first fight begins as an attempted attack on Mister Lebe and becomes a decisive encounter between two people prepared to meet violence with violence. At Mister Lebe’s fishpond, Iteung stops Ajo from reaching the man he has come to confront. Their drawn-out struggle ends not with a clear victory but with both fighters exhausted, and Iteung’s account of the Young Widow’s husband reveals that the injustice behind Ajo’s mission is worse than he knew.

Setting and Immediate Cause

Mister Lebe owns a fishpond with small bungalows and surrounding gardens, a place he often visits alone. Ajo sees the grounds as an ideal location for an ambush and goes there intending to get at Mister Lebe. He does not know that the businessman has a bodyguard.

That guard is Iteung, a young woman who intercepts Ajo on the footpath. She tells him she has been watching him and knows he has been targeting Mister Lebe. Her intervention turns Ajo’s planned attack into a direct confrontation with someone standing between him and his intended target.

The Fight

Iteung warns Ajo that he will have to get past her before he can touch Mister Lebe. Ajo recognizes the phrasing as the kind of line found in the martial-arts comics he read as a child, borrowed from a librarian who travelled by bicycle. The moment briefly strikes him as comic, but it does not make him underestimate the danger: he has never hit a woman and initially only shoves Iteung aside.

Iteung answers with an unexpected display of skill. She catches Ajo’s arm, pins it behind his back, and throws him down. When he gets up, she raises her fists. Ajo cannot identify what martial art she has learned; he has no formal training himself and relies instead on punching, kicking, dodging, and taking an opening when one appears. He agrees to fight her, and their encounter becomes a contest between her practiced technique and his rough, reckless approach.

The struggle lasts for more than an hour. Iteung is strong and has stamina despite her delicate appearance, while Ajo’s willingness to keep fighting makes him difficult to subdue. Both land blows, and neither can end the contest quickly. At last, too tired to do more than trade weak punches, they collapse in the grass, gasping for breath. Their mutual exhaustion, rather than a decisive knockout, is the fight’s outcome.

What the Encounter Reveals

The contest overturns Ajo’s assumption that he can simply push past the person guarding Mister Lebe. Iteung is not a passive obstacle: she can control his arm, throw him, withstand his attacks, and hold her own over a prolonged fight. Ajo, in turn, proves difficult to defeat not through formal martial-arts knowledge but through strength and a willingness to absorb punishment in order to retaliate.

Their brief exchange afterward leaves the result open to a measure of mutual respect. Iteung murmurs that Ajo is not bad; he answers that he can still take her. Neither claim settles who would win if they fought again. The ending preserves their rivalry as an unresolved balance between her skill and his persistence.

The Young Widow and the Fight’s Stakes

The confrontation is rooted in Ajo’s response to what Mister Lebe has done to the Young Widow. When Iteung explains that nobody sent her and that she came because she had heard about the woman, Ajo asks whether she means the Young Widow. Their exchange establishes that they have arrived at the same target from a shared concern, even though Ajo first meets Iteung as the person blocking his way.

Iteung then tells Mister Lebe that the Young Widow loved her husband and had no reason to betray him. She says the musician did not die of cholera, as people believed after he became ill at a party following a performance: he was poisoned. The widow herself does not know that her husband was murdered. This revelation clarifies why Iteung has intervened and deepens the cause behind Ajo’s intended attack: the apparent illness concealed a killing, while the surviving woman remains unaware of the truth.

Narrative Significance

The first fight establishes a pattern in which bodily conflict opens a route to information. Ajo reaches Mister Lebe’s fishpond expecting an ambush, but the guard he encounters is someone who shares his opposition to the businessman’s conduct. The scene changes the immediate question from whether Ajo can attack Mister Lebe to what lies beneath the accusation against him.

Its ending also resists the conventional certainty of a winner. Ajo and Iteung are left on equal terms, worn out by the encounter and still capable of answering one another. The fight introduces Iteung through action rather than explanation, then connects her physical resistance to her concern for the Young Widow and the concealed murder of her husband. The result is both an introduction to a formidable character and a disclosure of the violence concealed beneath the community’s account of the musician’s death.