A Friendship In Letters ✨ Calming Bedtime Story To Help You Fall Asleep Fast

[00:00:10] Good evening, Sleep Wave. I'm your host, Carissa, and tonight we have a lovely sleepy story to soothe our minds before bed. This is our weekly free episode. The best way to listen to the show is to become a subscriber. It's easy to sign up, and you will give yourself instant access to our entire back catalog and enjoy ad-free listening and two bonus episodes a month. Details in the show notes.

[00:00:35] Have you ever had a pen pal? Writing letters is something rare these days, but I think that's what makes it all the more special. When I was a child, I had a pen pal for about a year, and I will never forget how excited I was to run to the mailbox and see if I had a letter from him. We were both around 10 years old, I think, and I found those letters a few years ago, and it was touching to see what little things from our young day-to-day lives that we share with our friends.

[00:01:06] In tonight's story, we're joining a woman called Queenie, who was about to meet her pen pal for the first time 60 years after the pair posted their first letters. But first, before we begin, our only ad break which helps make this show possible. To listen ad-free, follow the link in the show notes. If your family enjoys the stories here on Sleepwave, and you're looking for something to listen to during the day, I think you'll love this.

[00:01:35] It's a podcast called The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian. It's a serialized science fiction story about an 8-year-old and his friends exploring space and solving mysteries, told in 15- to 20-minute episodes that are perfect for car rides or for winding down at the end of the day. The podcast is recorded by Jonathan Messenger and his son Griffin in the basement of their home and has a similar warm narrator feel that we have here on Sleepwave.

[00:02:05] It's built a whole host of loyal fans and even a shout-out from Time Out magazine, who pointed out how much fun kids have following the cruise adventures, exploring new planets, meeting aliens, and helping shape what happens next. It's one of those stories kids can get completely drawn into, and one I'm sure you'll enjoy listening to with them.

[00:02:28] So, if you're looking for a story podcast to share with your family, look for The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian on Apple Podcasts or head to gzmshows.com for more info. And be sure to tell them Sleep Wave sent you. Alright, let's settle in, cozy up, and let me tell you all about it.

[00:03:00] Queenie checked herself in the mirror one last time. When it came down to it, it didn't really matter what she looked like or what she wore, but she wanted to look nice for her friend. The summer dress, blue with yellow flowers, was coming up to ten years old, but still had bright colors and a fun flair around the hem. Whereas once she might have worn it with heels, now she had low, sensible, comfortable shoes.

[00:03:30] With age comes practicality, after all. Her cardigan, chunky, pale blue, had a hint of old lady about it, she did acknowledge. But there had been a brisk breeze in recent days, and she wasn't going to chance it. Queenie paused for a moment when she picked up the bottle of perfume, undecided whether it might be considered too much.

[00:03:57] But in the end, she gave a quick spritz to each wrist and rubbed them together. And with that, she was floating in a scented floral cloud, a smile instantly appearing on her face. She held the handrail as she went down the stairs. It was strange to think all those decades back when she would have leapt up, two at a time, long legs drawing her easily to the top.

[00:04:26] Now, each ascent of the stairs was akin to climbing a mountain, with preparations set in place to ensure she didn't go up or down more times than was strictly necessary in a day. Queenie's husband, Ron, met her at the bottom of the stairs. You look beautiful, sweetheart, he said, leaning in to give her a gentle kiss on the cheek.

[00:04:54] Amir will count himself very lucky indeed to be sharing lunch with you, I'm sure. After all these years, Queenie still blushed whenever he called her sweetheart, hiding her glowing cheeks by smiling down at her feet. How strange that she had known Amir even longer than she had Ron.

[00:05:18] Sixty years to Ron's fifty, and yet she had never met him. She had no idea what his voice sounded like. She didn't know what he called his wife when they were together. But somehow, she felt as if she knew everything about him. For six decades, they had exchanged messages, starting off with letters, handwritten, decorated with drawings,

[00:05:46] before finally, in the last twenty years, progressing to emails. They both missed the solidity of proper letters, though. And more often than not, would painstakingly copy out any emails by hand, sending them in the post, too. At least four times a year, they had written to each other. And Queenie now had a collection of over three hundred letters.

[00:06:15] Amir, of course, had the same. Hers were stored in a series of shoeboxes, carefully ordered by date. And she knew them all so well, she could reach in and find any particular letter at any moment. Amir kept his in a leather satchel embroidered with an elephant. There was no order within that satchel.

[00:06:40] He preferred to dig in and pull out a random letter and be instantly transported back to that time. It made his brain work harder, he argued to his wife, having to remember the befores and afters. Queenie could check her neat logical system. It meant that Queenie's view of Amir's life was more specific, with a reason understood for every thought he'd shared.

[00:07:09] Amir's understanding of Queenie was more widespread. He could guess what she would think about something or how she would feel, but he wouldn't necessarily be able to pinpoint why. Today, they would finally meet in person. Amir had lived in India his entire life. Queenie had first addressed her letters to Bombay,

[00:07:36] and then, since the late 90s, had learned to change this to Mumbai. And Amir had started addressing his letters to Oxford, and, well, had kept doing that all these years. Nothing much has changed in Oxford, after all, since it became a university almost a thousand years ago.

[00:08:01] They were due to meet at the tea rooms that stand in the same square as the Radcliffe Camera, that great domed edifice that somehow defines Oxford. Queenie had chosen the place specially, wanting to show off, perhaps, the most beautiful part of the city. They would have to jostle for space with tourists and the clusters of language students,

[00:08:30] but it was worth it. And besides, after lunch, she could always take him into the Radcliffe Camera, and they could retreat into the silence of its glorious library. Being a professor had its perks. She was a professor of psychology, made famous by her work on joy and the sources of happiness. Ron was a professor of neuroscience,

[00:08:58] probing the mechanics of the brain she sought to understand. They had met during their second year of being undergraduates, both standing awkwardly to the side of one of the infamous Mayballs, and by the end of the evening, they had both known, in that quiet way these things can happen, that they would be together forever.

[00:09:27] Amir had come into her life somewhat more randomly. It was back at school, and she was ten years old, and a middle-aged couple visited to talk about their recent trip to India. Queenie had never fully understood why they had appeared, but they seemed very sincere in their desire to share stories of their travels.

[00:09:53] They showed the children how to make dal and flatbreads and raita, with cumin and curry and a thousand spices running through them, flavors that Queenie had never encountered before. And they'd taken out a globe, and shown them where the Himalayas rose to the sky in the north, and where India poured into the sea in the south,

[00:10:21] and pictures of Delhi and the Taj Mahal, and of houseboats floating on lakes, and temples that were dotted with monkeys. A tiger looked out at them from a jungle, and an elephant bathed in the endless waters of the Ganges.

[00:10:42] The colors and light and life were so different to anything Queenie had seen in Oxford. A city built from beautiful yellow, cotswalled stone, each college more exquisite than the last, but nothing that seemed to show the inexhaustible variety of India.

[00:11:11] And then the couple had handed out letters, just randomly giving them to each child, saying they had visited a school in Bombay, and asked the children to write someone, anyone, back in England. The couple told Queenie's teacher that they would be happy to organize postage for replies back to the children in India,

[00:11:36] and so the next day the class was tasked with responding to almost complete strangers. Queenie had never forgotten that first letter. The handwriting was beautiful, neatly written in perfect rows across unlined paper. The boy's name was Emir, and he had a younger brother and sister, and his favorite subject was mathematics.

[00:12:04] He liked playing cricket, particularly batting. He was good at batting, he dared to say, and he was coming on as a bowler, and on the weekends he helped his mother in her bookstore. His father worked on the railways, railways that he told her had been created by the British almost a century before, traveling to all corners of the country,

[00:12:33] rattling their way along the tracks. One day, Emir hoped to explore his country too, but for now, all he knew was his corner of Bombay. It was strange replying to somebody when all you had was a few basic facts about their life. She noted that she didn't have any brothers or sisters, and that it must be nice to have them,

[00:13:01] and that her favorite subject was literature, but she also loved science and doing experiments. She told him how the class had been asked to prove gravity the previous week, and how she had been the one to climb as high up in the tree as she could, and drop different objects down to the ground. Thinking of it now, Queenie smiled.

[00:13:30] No school would actively encourage children to climb trees these days. And she sighed a little. She supposed it was with good reason, but it did feel as though the world had lost a little magic when you weren't told to pull yourself up the strong boughs of a tree and look down at the dappled ground.

[00:13:59] She had always found something comforting about climbing trees, and had only really stopped in the last ten years when her limbs had given up cooperating as they once had. She didn't know, but if you asked Amir to describe her then, he would always talk about her sitting in a tree, legs dangling, the scent of flowers filling the air,

[00:14:28] a few leaves caught in her hair. And Queenie told him that her father was a professor at the University of Mathematics, but honestly, he was nothing in comparison to her mother. Her mother didn't work. She came from the sort of family that wouldn't allow her to go to university or get a job, but she proved every night at the dinner table

[00:14:56] that she was far smarter and wiser than Queenie's father could ever be. He wouldn't have argued that point either. He used to say he'd just stumbled by dumb luck into his job and his marriage. Queenie had learned two things from her parents. Humility from her father,

[00:15:23] and the power of books and private study from her mother. The couple who had visited Queenie's school did as they promised, returning a few days later to gather up the replies the children had written and bundling them together in a single package to post. It could take months, they warned, before anyone received a reply, and they wouldn't be involved in that.

[00:15:54] Individuals were on their own now. If they'd made a connection, that was marvelous. But if they hadn't, never mind. Perhaps they would find a pen pal another way. Pen pal. Queenie remembered the first time she'd heard the word, pulling it into its separate parts. A writing friendship. Her ten-year-old self loved the idea,

[00:16:22] and she began to imagine herself as some famous letter writer in the future. People craving to see the messages she had sent around the world, and the responses she'd received. Now in her seventies, she could laugh at that thought. Somehow, nothing and everything had been exchanged in her letters.

[00:16:49] The frustrations of everyday life, the things that bothered her, and the things that were moments of magic, the wonder that kept the world turning. The letters only meant anything to her and Amir, and that was more than enough. Amir was one of the few from India to write back,

[00:17:18] encouraged by his mother one hot Saturday afternoon as he kicked his legs in the bookshop and complained that he should be allowed to play cricket, otherwise he would never, ever be a famous cricketer. He could laugh at that now too. How so many children have this idea they want to be famous,

[00:17:46] and then they grow up to be anything but. Yet, somehow, life is still perfect. Queenie liked to send him quotes from the books she read, and goodness, she read a lot. And he always remembered the one she'd found when she read, The Painted Veil. She must have been around 30 years old,

[00:18:14] and she'd laughed back at their younger selves and their desires to be famous. Because by then, they'd both already realized it wasn't going to happen, and that it didn't matter. Amir could never remember the quotes by heart, but he knew where to find them in the pages of the books, because he found and kept a copy of them all,

[00:18:41] a special shelf in his library dedicated to Queenie's quotations. If he was in that library now, he could run his finger along the shelf and draw down the book, then flick through the pages, and look there, down at the bottom of page 79, and find it.

[00:19:07] I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. Somerset Malm had written, It went on, The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.

[00:19:37] Of all these, the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. It was this idea that had led to Queenie's particular study of joy and happiness. She was determined to find how people could define

[00:20:03] and then live that beautiful life. Queenie came home from school one day to find Amir's letter propped up on her desk. She hardly ever received post, and she caught her breath looking at this. A letter that had traveled 5,000 miles

[00:20:30] from the back streets of Bombay all the way to her desk in the heart of Oxford. Before she opened it, she looked at the stamp, caressing it gently with her thumb, a red flower placed perfectly squarely in the corner of the envelope. The postmark was slightly smudged.

[00:21:01] It had taken five weeks for the letter to arrive, and she wondered about its route, where it had been along the way. She thought of how many hands must have touched it, pushing it in the right direction, bringing it to her door. It seemed almost a magical system,

[00:21:29] this business of post. She finally brought herself to open it, laughing aloud as she read the first line, having a brother and sister can be a nightmare. Amir had written, with nightmare in capital letters and underlined, six exclamation marks leading to the edge of the page.

[00:22:00] He told her he'd heard of Oxford University, where her father worked, and she was surprised. She had no idea it was something that important. Someone might have heard about it in another country. And further down, he'd written that he scored a century in cricket last week when they were playing against their main rivals, a school on the other side of the city.

[00:22:29] And actually, having a brother and sister wasn't so bad after all, because they'd celebrated with him by making his favorite, Gulab Jamun. He'd written this, and then moved on to something else, talk of the bookstore and how much he thought Queenie would enjoy it, and left it as if she would of course know what Gulab Jamun was. She read it a few times,

[00:22:58] turning the letter this way and that to check she'd read it correctly. Queenie remembered asking her mother later that evening what it might be, and she said she had no idea, but she would be sure to find out. And the next day, Queenie had returned home to a book of Indian recipes sitting on her desk. Flipping through,

[00:23:26] she found Gulab Jamun, discovering that it was known as rosewater berry, and was made from heated milk made into dough, served floating in a sugar syrup flavored with cardamom and rose water. She had no idea what any of these things were, but they sounded wonderful to her, as if from a magical kingdom.

[00:23:55] From that day forwards, the air in Queenie's home danced with the spices of India. She would go with her mother at weekends, exploring the distant stores on the edges of the city, where people sold these unusual ingredients in shops that were filled to the ceiling with strange packages that sparkled with promises.

[00:24:26] Then they would return and follow the recipes, serving them triumphantly at dinner. Queenie knew her father had never really enjoyed all the flavors, but he had smiled and tried everything they presented him with, complimenting the colors or the scents or the imagination behind them, if nothing else.

[00:24:55] And Queenie determined to open up Amir's world in the same way, casually dropping in references to things like bread and butter pudding and, when December came round, to mince pies and Christmas cakes. Whenever she had mentioned a particular favorite, she couldn't wait for his reply,

[00:25:23] knowing that he would have dived into the shelves of his mother's bookshop and found the recipe and done his best to create a version of it from the ingredients he could find. Most people would have guessed only a few possible outcomes for this budding friendship. Either one of them would get bored of it,

[00:25:53] and the letters would slowly become shorter and shorter and then fade away altogether. Or the two would fall in love and embark on some wild, cross-continental romance that would be the stuff of storybooks. But nobody predicted in those early years, and this, to be honest,

[00:26:23] includes both Queenie and Amir, that they would forge a friendship that would last for more than half a century. Nobody could have guessed that they would share their innermost secrets with a person they never met. At first, Queenie's friends had laughed when they heard she still wrote to her little Indian boy, as they referred to him.

[00:26:52] Although photographs showed Amir was tall and willowy and certainly not little. They'd teased her for years, but over time, they'd realized this friendship wasn't going away, and it was real. So when Queenie had announced that Amir was coming to England for the very first time,

[00:27:21] they'd all understood how momentous a thing this was for her. She had shared her life with him, and now they were to meet face to face. What if he wasn't what she'd created in her mind? What if the Amir of letters was different

[00:27:51] to the Amir of face-to-face conversation? Ron knew Queenie had these thoughts, too. And before she left that day, to go and meet him in the tea room by the Radcliffe camera, in the most beautiful corner corner of a beautiful city. He turned to her and said

[00:28:20] she mustn't worry. She knew the real Amir already. He would be exactly as she'd imagined. She must treat herself. Queenie took off the cardigan and put it on again five times over before she reached the tea room. She found

[00:28:50] herself flustered, almost rushing into students with their bicycles, distracted by every person walking by, checking them again and again to see if they were Amir. She saw him. She saw him from behind, but she knew it was him. He was wearing a cream-colored suit

[00:29:20] and a straw hat, and he stood with his hands holding the gates of All Souls College. He was peering into the square, a calm oasis compared to the busyness behind him that constantly bustled around the Radcliffe camera, tourists lining up for photographs, and students

[00:29:49] brushing past with their books and bicycles. He was as tall and slender as he had always been in the few photographs he had sent over the years. When he made the university cricket team, when he graduated, when he married, Queenie was instantly calmed,

[00:30:18] knowing that this person, this man, couldn't be anything but the emir of her letters for all these years. He was the schoolboy who had longed to be a famous cricketer. He was the student studying late into the night, finally passing his exams to become an engineer.

[00:30:48] He was the young man who traveled the trains of his country, pressing ahead with plans for new lines and bridges and stations. He was the husband who was fortunate enough to adore the wife chosen for him by his parents, a lady who smiled out of the wedding photograph in a red and gold sari, draped

[00:31:18] exquisitely around her tiny body. He was the father who bounced his children on his knee, and the grandfather who now did the same with his grandchildren. children. He was the man who could be angry and frustrated, and the man who could find beauty in a single leaf floating in the breeze.

[00:31:48] Queenie went and stood alongside him, holding the railings in the same manner and looking into the quiet oasis. Care for some tea? she said, turning to him with a smile. and the tall man in a cream-colored suit and a straw hat looked down at her and smiled in turn. Queenie,

[00:32:17] he said, offering her his arm, I have wanted nothing more these past sixty years. Come, let us make up for lost time.