In the front-row audience at the Wills India Lifestyle Fashion Week here this afternoon, sits a 29-year-old in a crisp white shirt, blue jeans and brown aviator sunglasses perched atop his cropped gelled hair. He hasn’t travelled far from his Sainik Farms house to be here today, a place where he says he feels at home.

But clearly, Tariq Ahmed Dar has travelled a long way since he was picked up for suspected links to the Lashkar-e-Toiba and then released from Tihar Jail after three months when police said they didn’t have “enough” evidence.

“Aise trauma se guzarney ke baad bahut waqt lagta hai realise karney mein ki aapki zindagi phir say normal ho gayi hai, (after going through this kind of trauma, it takes a long time to realise that life is normal once again),” he says. “Most of my time goes in telling myself that my life is back on the rails.”

Dar, who was a fashion model in Dhaka where his father ran a shawl business, was first picked up by the Bangla police. The Indian High Commission in Dhaka wrote six letters to Bangladeshi authorities to clarify the charges against him. When he was finally deported, the charge was that he was an agent of the Research and Analysis Wing.

The Delhi Police arrested him on his return from Bangladesh on October 25, 2006. When he was released after three months, Joint Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Karnal Singh said they “could not gather enough evidence so he was let off.”

... contd.