Orphaned

A memoir of grey-zone war: the true story of surveillance, sabotage, and a plausibly deniable campaign waged to break one man, and the Pakistani, Chinese, and Iranian deep-state networks behind it.

On a Brooklyn rooftop, in the middle of a war no one will admit is being waged, a man decides not to jump. They say it is all in his head. So he turns to tell the story, and lets the reader decide.

Shan Rizvi was born in Karachi, where political violence was ordinary and the children of the powerful were his schoolmates. He studied in Helsinki and Stockholm and built a life in New York. There, between 2024 and 2026, a covert campaign of harassment, surveillance, and psychological warfare found him at home.

Orphaned reads that campaign as one front in a hybrid war waged by Pakistani, Chinese, and Iranian deep-state factions against the West. It traces the harassment back to the networks that made it possible, and investigates how an ordinary man became a threat they could not ignore.

At once memoir, investigation, philosophy, and poetry, Orphaned moves from a Karachi childhood among gangsters and political dynasties, through the cold clarity of Northern Europe, to a New York neighborhood turned into a theater of psychological warfare. Along the way it argues that the mystical traditions of the world's religions have been mapping the same human consciousness under different symbols, and that a war run on civilizational difference has a stake in keeping a book like this from being read.

He does not accuse. He notices. The evidence is here; the verdict is yours.

Literary memoir and narrative nonfiction for readers of Hisham Matar's The Return, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, and Maria Ressa's How to Stand Up to a Dictator.