“Djinns, the invisible beings made
of smokeless fire, are Allah’s creations. Human beings cannot create or beget them, but whether it was a djinn or not, a rumour took birth that day that a djinn had been born at the residence of Noor ul Haq, barrister-at-law.”

Of Smokeless Fire is the story of a lifelong friendship between three unlikely children. Mansoor, the rumoured djinn, who balanced his love and loyalty between his devoutly religious mother and his erudite, alcoholic father; Mehrun, the churail—a Medusa-like creature—who struggled to get an English-medium education, the elusive ticket out of poverty; and Joseph, the bhangi, a derisive name for a sweeper, who dreamed of becoming a movie star as he cleaned the toilets of the rich and powerful. Wearing their insults like a garland, they transgressed society’s norms and followed their dreams, their lives intimately tied to the vagaries of Pakistan’s politics, alternating between tragedies and triumphs.

This is a story about belonging and displacement. It is a reminder that belonging is not just about allegiance, and exile is not just physical. The novel asks the questions: Once you are ripped from your homeland, do you become homeless forever? What does it mean to live in a land that has forsaken you? Whether rooted or uprooted, is your relationship with your country conditioned by its politics?