Elmo Jayawardena, in The Island, 1 February 2021, where the chosen title is “Boi Kollo –An Almost Forgotten Tragedy”
He first went to work at the very tender age of six, just a little kid, that much Yoga re-called. He had attended a village school for two days and quit – said he could not understand anything the teacher taught. That was good enough a reason for Yoga to obliterate any form of education from his entire life and become illiterate. They lived in the Southerland Estate, a remnant of the British Colonial system. Estate labourers’ ‘line-shacks’ had limited room for the family. The little boy was an inconvenience that needed to be sorted out. Of course, he was an ill-affordable extra mouth to feed in the already over-crowded one-roomed hovel they called home. That is how Yoga left his Southerland Mansion to commence his lifetime career of servitude as a Boi Kolla (BK) to run and fetch at the beck and call of whoever gave him a meal and shelter.
