Aasiyah Qamar & Nolwynn Ardennes

Life's good until it throws you the one curve you never wanted or expected

We all have the 'plan'. Call it a career plan, a life plan, a game plan - we've all at one point of our life mapped out our progression for the years to come. Now what happens when this plan takes a serious blow? This is the starting point of Light My World.

Imagine your life mapped out for you from the minute you are born. You are a girl, born to parents of Indian descent in a land where tradition and customs still rule culture and mindsets. By twenty-five, you're expected to already be married and if not already a mother, have a kid on the way. You uphold the family honour this way. This is very much the situation faced by young women in Mauritius, and it can even be said that the old-maid-by-twenty-six line crosses cultures and is even a national preoccupation. Two decades on you is fine; three decades, oh dear God, what do we have on our hands?

This is the situation Diya Hemant faces a few months prior to her twenty-fifth birthday. Marry at all costs because this is what's expected of you. But Diya has never, ever done what's been expected of her! A tomboy and a teenage rebel, she grew up into a sassy young woman with her own agenda as to how to tackle her game plan. She's a modern-day Cinderella who's gonna set out to find her Prince, and if he's got notions of settling down and starting a family asap, well, he cannot be her Prince. Period.

What then happens when the prince in question has already been married and comes with a ready-made family? What's Diya to do? Strike him off her list right away, that's what she should do! But will Fate agree to do her bidding?

Said Prince Charming has nothing charming about him at first, except for his good looks. But even this is not enough to obliterate the hard, embittered and sullen man he is. His name is Trent Garrison. He's British, widowed, and has two hellions as sons. Trent wants nothing more from life than to get on with the day-to-day stuff and bring his kids up as best as he single-handedly can. He sure hadn't counted on a tornado the likes of Diya Hemant to wreck havoc in his game plan.

Tradition versus modernity. It was the starting point of this novel. Diya is actually the younger sister of Lara, my heroine in The Other Side. While she simply appeared as a secondary character in the first book, her character took on a life of her own and screamed to have her story told. Her argument? There are many in her situation today.

The generation from which Diya comes has always been exposed to cable TV, the Internet, SMSes. In short, she is a child of the global world. One side of her has always had a firm grasp on modernity, while the other, albeit recalcitrant side, was solidly anchored into tradition thanks to her overbearing, customs-zealous mother. If you take one look around Mauritius today, you'd find many girls just like her. Take a peek at second-generation Indian descendants too, like in London and New York, and you get the same data - how to reconcile modernity with tradition, tradition they feel is not part of who they are. It is archaic to think of arranged marriages, parent approbation of a suitor, same-culture/race couples as the only way there is today. Women want more, yet, where does the wanting end? The youth know this too - there has to be a balance. Life cannot simply be about clubs, drinks and sex. Values remain, whether we want them or not, because they have been instilled in us since our earliest days.

Modernity is at the heart of Light My World, and modernity also touches upon the issue of the single father. A thing unheard of until recent decades. Who is this man who's the modern-day dad? What does he want from life? Does he look for love? How does he reconcile a role that's basically not his (the caregiver, the nurturer) with the man he inherently is?

Upon this backdrop emerges Trent Garrison. Plunged into this role of single father, he doesn't complain and tackles it as best he can. His priority is his children, but is that enough for the person inside? For the heart that beats inside yet which he wants to stifle at every opportunity because he cannot afford to let himself go?

What do you do when Fate throws in the wrench you most wanted to avoid? This is the question Diya and Trent ask themselves, and I hope you'll enjoy finding the answer as much as I enjoyed writing their story.

I often like to have a musical theme for my stories, and the first time I heard 'If you're not the one' by Daniel Bedingfield, I knew I had found the exact emotional setup that was so characteristic of Light My World. You may just have found the person you'd been looking for all your life, but what to do when he/she comes with terms you're not ready to accept or compromise on?

The setting for Light My World is the western coast of Mauritius, the village of Tamarin to be more precise. Tamarin is renowned for its low humidity and constant sun throughout the year, and as such, it is the region where enormous, shallow beds of sea water are left to evaporate in the sun and leave the gleaming crystals of sea salt behind. The village also has the mouth of one of the longest rivers of the island where it meets the waters of the Tamarin Bay, a prime hotspot for surfing afficionados. The pictures on the page were shot in Tamarin, with views of the river's mouth, the delta in the bay, the salt beds drying in the sun and the beams of the iconic Tamarin Bridge that mark the entrance of the village.

Paradise on earth - unexpected love is the one thing that can tear this bliss to pieces.