Mister Lebe’s fishpond is more than the property of a businessman who goes there for solitude: its bungalow, gardens, and waters become the setting for Ajo Kawir’s attack on Mister Lebe, his first encounter with Iteung, and, later, the couple’s reconciliation. The place holds these sharply different turns together, linking a scheme for revenge with a return to intimacy.

Setting and First Encounter

Mister Lebe owns the fishpond and often visits it to be alone. Small bungalows and gardens surround the water, giving the grounds the secluded character Ajo Kawir seeks when he plans an ambush. He goes there intending to confront Mister Lebe, unaware that the businessman has a young woman serving as his bodyguard.

That guard is Iteung. She intercepts Ajo Kawir on a footpath and tells him she knows he has been watching Mister Lebe. When Ajo Kawir shoves her aside rather than strike her, Iteung turns the encounter around by pinning his arm and throwing him down. The fishpond thus becomes the site of their first meeting, one in which Ajo Kawir’s planned attack is interrupted by the woman who will become his partner.

Attack on Mister Lebe and Its Immediate Aftermath

The fishpond remains the setting for Ajo Kawir’s confrontation with Mister Lebe after his encounter with Iteung. He finds Mister Lebe feeding the fish and approaches him without a mask, explaining that he has something to discuss. The businessman does not recognize him and invites him into the small bungalow. Their conversation ends with Ajo Kawir taking out a pocketknife and cutting off Mister Lebe’s left ear as a sign of their agreement. He throws the ear into the pond, where a fish catches it; the narrative leaves the fish’s kind uncertain, briefly flattening goldfish, carp, and catfish into interchangeable inhabitants of the water.

The fishpond’s quiet grounds frame the consequences beyond the attack itself. Ajo Kawir later wakes at Gecko’s house, where Gecko has stayed beside him for three days and three nights. The pond is therefore tied not only to Ajo Kawir’s assault on Mister Lebe but also to the recovery that follows it, with the attack’s aftermath carried away from the scene and into the care of his friend.

Return to the Fishpond

The fishpond becomes a place of return after the violence of Ajo Kawir’s first visit. When he later asks to see Iteung, a woman tells him that Iteung is not there but often asks her father to bring her to Mister Lebe’s fishpond. She does not explain why Iteung likes the place; she only says that Iteung sits in the grass. The detail gives the grounds a different association: they are no longer only the secluded setting of a planned ambush, but also a place Iteung chooses while she is separated from Ajo Kawir.

Ajo Kawir goes to find her alone. Near the fishpond, he rests his head in Iteung’s lap as she holds him, wipes blood from his nose, and caresses his face; he returns her tenderness by wiping tears from her cheeks. Their reunion turns the place once marked by confrontation into a setting for mutual care. When Ajo Kawir asks what she would do with a man who cannot get an erection, Iteung answers that she will marry him. At the fishpond, the relationship is affirmed not by denying Ajo Kawir’s condition but by Iteung’s stated decision to remain with him.

A Place Shared by Violence and Return

The fishpond’s meaning extends beyond the two encounters between Ajo Kawir and Iteung. Later, on a rocky road linking the main road with Ci Jaro village, the pair stop at the same roadside food stall. The stall’s owner says that if she knew where the Tiger was, she would make him repay what he owed her; Ajo Kawir dismisses the claim, pointing out that the Tiger is rich and unlikely to owe money there. The scene places the fishpond within a wider landscape of remembered grievance and unsettled debts, while the grounds themselves hold a more intimate contradiction: they first draw Ajo Kawir as a secluded place to pursue revenge, then become a place where Iteung sits alone and where the two reunite. Its importance lies in that return, not in any stated transformation of the property: the same setting gathers the story’s violence, separation, and renewed commitment.