Fayyaz Vellani is a British-Canadian writer who has lived in London, New York, Toronto, and Philadelphia, where he teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His stories have appeared in The Bookends Review and F-Word Magazine, and his first novel, Tea with Ms. Tanzania, will be published by Africa World Press in 2022.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Vellani speaks with Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum about his recent writings, as well as his love of music, his diverse experiences teaching in different countries, and more!
It never rained anymore—it sweated. Moisture hung like a curtain of milky cataracts over the day, waiting to be lifted. Dampness had oozed into the bricks of my apartment building, found its way into cracks of the bathroom, and turned the caulking black. Not quite black mold, not yet. The heaviness weighed me down, and I had to drag myself out of bed, no longer hopeful for the catharsis of a thunderstorm.
The painters had finished yesterday, and I needed to reassemble the apartment. Even after I had pointed out the blackness creeping up the walls and ceilings of the bathroom like a spider’s web, my husband Danny refused to admit he could see any problem. “The place looks fine. It’s too much work. And to do it now, ahuvati?”…
There were plenty of reasons to be annoyed, Katell thought. The smell of salt in the air was the most immediate, nagging one. She noticed the stink of it clinging to everything. Her clothes. The awful pasty yellow walls of her new bedroom. Her stepmom’s overweight rescue pug, Sebastian. Katell missed Montreal deeply, but she was afraid to express this to anyone in the house. They would smother her with insincere sympathy. So, she pretended she was above homesickness and focused her energy on the other things that annoyed her about Foirer, Nova Scotia.
Sorting through her dead grandmother’s things was taking longer than anyone anticipated. Katell hadn’t known Granny Durkee very well. After her parents split, Katell and her mum had only come by Nova Scotia once a year or so.…
With their gray iron limbs, long waxy leaves, and fat blossom clusters, rhododendrons are both stately and homey. Throughout my childhood, I crawled under their uneven skirts, their bodies sheltering me, their leaves shielding me. There, between a soil floor and naturally thatched roof, I relished my sanctuary, and, in my mind, nothing could reach me there.
Then my grandfather came to town.
*
Back in the seventies, our Southern Appalachian neighborhood hummed with life, especially in summertime. Kids swarmed everywhere. We buzzed around, feral and wild, as if following invisible beelines that lured us across the hot streets down into the cool woods, then back home at twilight.
In the woods encasing our neighborhood, mushrooms gathered together, dark and silent like members of forest-dwelling covens.…
This evening, I ended my walk with a terrific skid. Just as I recovered the sun peeked out from wherever it had been hiding, to warm my neck and face and the streetlights, as if to share in my relief, flickered to life.
It took me back, to one of those flights from Hawaii or Japan that landed at LAX at dawn We banked and I could see the sun’s earliest light sharing the stage with runway lights backgrounded by a city so calm and gentle I had to pinch myself to remember where I was.
You and I no longer worship the sun as god. Yet doesn’t the sunset, for all its colorful hallelujahs, bring with it the same odd unease that drove our primitive ancestors to light bonfires to coax the sun back to life.…
The holes in the heels of my shoes admit snowmelt and tiny pebbles. Slopping around the neighborhood, exercising my fistulous heart, I feel electric blue abstractions riding the chill. Being alone
with the mist blown from the marsh and the roadside puddles grinning, I don’t have to explain to you the absence that three quarters of a century of living have imposed.
The short day draws on itself like a gray man smoking a pipe. I’d say, listen to the wind undress the already half-naked trees— but you’re at home stroking the cats and reading about current events.…
