The other day I was telling my mother that I considered Fidou as a pretty typical Mauritian nickname for a Mauritian little girl. She said that the counterpart for a Mauritian little boy would be Garcon. The name Fidou conjures to me the image of a little girl in pink dress and a ponytail, sitting on a low stone wall, eating a pixidou ( also, touchingly, part of my wife's childhood 15 000 kms away) or a merveille, while up the street there runs Garcon, pushing up a wheel with a stick, or riding a big black Phoenix bicycle "en bas cadre", a feat I was never up to. In our Mauritian mind, childhood is a blessed world wonderfully removed from the soiled fingers of politicians and socio cultural lobbyists - they cannot stick their yellow star identity badges on Fidou and Garcon. Hence do Vovo and Ameena , in the beautiful "Le Paille en Queue" by Mr Bigaignon, though pinched by hunger and lice, thoroughly beaten up by arrogant uncles and teachers, yet roam unblemished in their tattered paradise, until the advent of youth - which spells the expulsion from the garden.
We Mauritians would love to go back to the Garcons and Fidous we once were - sometimes they come back , these memories- of running in a narrow lane between hovels, to suddenly stop, at the arresting sight : from a window, three toothless hags beckon at us, crooked fingers straightening a stray wisp of grey dirty hair, then resuming their gesture of calling us. we run away laughing. Another time - the sharp flash of light reflecting on water - and a recollection of a jump into a pond. The smell of incense, and the play of colours, when a neighbour was building up a cavadee. the climb up the crumbling cemetery, covered with brede mouroung, to see a coffin being lowered in a county cemetery, and the cowing in the bed, at night, after hearing stories of dain and chourel, the peering into narrow crevices to look for freshwater shrimp, and the gaze far up to follow the course of one's kite.