Why a date and why May 28?
Many people have asked me this question!
Why a date for a title? Why particularly May 28?
Answering the first question…
I chose a date as the title for my book because it is an anchor for the main protagonist- Naina Rai.She always relates May 28 to Hope because of an incident that happened on that day. The date had later got so firmly embedded in her mind that the incident soon loses significance and only Hope is what gets connected to the date. Any time she feels that something is impossible to achieve she remembers the date and automatically Hope enters and strengthens her. Then nothing seems so difficult any more!
I learnt about anchors in Neuro-linguistic Programming or NLP and the powers it has to transform the way people think. I used the same psychology in my novel. May 28 became a day for Naina to hope even when everything around her seems hopeless and impossible.
Why particularly May 28…
I think everyone at some stage in life would’ve used the Ouija board, even if they didn’t believe in it. I still don’t believe in it but my friends did at one point in time. That’s where May 28 comes in…
I have 2 friends who are unapologetic pranksters. They chanced upon the Ouija board and decided to ask questions to willing spirits. So they called upon the spirit of a young girl. They had many questions but the most common ones were Who is my life partner and when am I going to meet him? I think all girls in their teens want to know the answers to these 2 questions.
I remember the movie “Only You” where Marisa Tomei is desperate to know the name of the man she is to marry and lands up with the name Damon Bradley. Then follows all the funny situations when she goes in search of the man with that name. I absolutely loved the movie!
But coming back to my friends and the spirit… They get an answer from the spirit( don’t know how much to believe here!) which says that they’ll meet 2 men whose initials start from S and P who will be the ones they marry and they will meet them on May 28. Now which May 28 i don’t know but some May 28.
Suddenly this date became very important and it was religiously marked on all calenders every year since it was told to them. I heard it so many times that I had got literally fed up!
But weirdly so both my friends fell in love with men whose initials started from S and P respectively. One of them married S. The other girl is waiting to get married to P. Now whether they met these men on May 28 is open to speculation but here is where i saw a story forming in my mind.
With this incident the idea of May 28 took root. The story is quite different from the incident I mentioned but that is the task of the story teller. I weaved everything around a single thread and voila! I had a story ready 
