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One of the male agents approached and, according to Shah, "He said, ‘I’d like to talk to you on the side.’" The man did not identify himself, Shah says. Nor did he explain what he wanted to discuss. Leery, Shah says he "flatly yet politely" refused.

Johnson, who corroborates Shah’s account of this exchange, and her roommate tapped Shah on the shoulder. "My roommate told him, ‘Right on, dude. Good answer,’" she says.

Evidently, the Secret Service did not agree. About a half-hour later, as the march neared Government Center, Jesse Kirkpatrick, a North End resident who attended the demonstration, noticed a Boston cop and a plain-clothes official congregating on the side. Suddenly, they grabbed a fellow protester, Shah, who had been walking "in front of us and beside us for a while," Kirkpatrick says. The men spirited Shah into an alley near Court and Cambridge Streets, which was quickly blocked off by a line of uniformed officers. Kirkpatrick couldn’t grasp why authorities had nabbed Shah, he says, because Shah "had been marching with us for a good deal of time, and I hadn’t seen him do anything out of the ordinary."

For Shah, what happened next calls to mind a George Orwell novel, when the powers-that-be snuff out the protagonist with no regard for constitutional rights. Suddenly, Shah was whisked down an alley by two men, who ominously warned him not to resist. Seconds later, he found himself sitting on a step, in the shadow of Boston City Hall, his hands cuffed behind his back. One man, according to Shah, identified himself as Secret Service. "He told me, ‘We noticed you in the security zone. We saw you walking, stopping, and looking around,’" Shah recounts.

The agent told Shah that his actions had "raised their suspicion," and demanded to see identification. Nervous, yet insistent he had done nothing wrong, Shah sat silently. "I realized," he explains, "they had pulled me out of the march for stopping, walking, and looking about — all basic human activities."

By this time, several dozen marchers had gathered at the scene. Some demanded that the police justify their actions. Others chanted, "No racist arrests!" As word spread about the detention, the protests grew louder. Steve Iskovitz, of Somerville, echoes a half-dozen eyewitnesses interviewed by the Phoenix when he says: "They held this guy because he looks like he’s from over there. Like from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, one of those places."

It would take only minutes before Brockton attorney John Pavlos, who represented the organizers of the march and who attended the event, followed the sounds of the protesters to the alley. Pavlos quickly gathered that Shah needed legal help. When he inquired what happened, he recalls, "One of the Secret Service guys, who identified himself to me as such, indicated that they had observed suspicious behavior from Vijay" — to wit, he was "walking and looking around."

Pavlos questions whether such behavior actually qualifies as grounds for "reasonable suspicion," the legal term that allows law enforcement to temporarily detain someone. He explains, "I was doing the same thing as Vijay that day, walking around, looking at the spectacle of security. It seemed clear to me that Vijay’s behavior was only suspicious because of what he looks like."

Shah appointed Pavlos his attorney, and the latter negotiated with police to end what he considered an "illegal detention." Shah would submit to a photograph; in return, he would be released. "I thought it was a fair compromise," Shah says, not least of all because he’d been held, against his will, for two hours by then. The Secret Service and the Boston police took pictures. Yet rather than let Shah go, Pavlos charges, "they reneged on the deal." Minutes later, Pavlos was muscled aside by several cops as Shah was shoved into a police cruiser.

Hauled off to the Boston A-1 Police Station, Shah says he was held in an open, graffiti-covered room. Inside, two Boston officers and the Secret Service agent accused Shah of not cooperating. Again, they demanded Shah’s ID, but he was reluctant. "I don’t like delivering my personal information to Secret Service," is how he puts it.

As Shah was subjected to questions — such as where he lives and why he attended college in Oregon 10 years ago — Pavlos and a dozen or so protesters walked the short distance to the A-1 station. According to Pavlos, he requested permission to see his client during the interrogation, but a Boston sergeant "was running interference for the Secret Service." He adds, "I made no fewer than five requests of the Boston police asking to see my client," to no avail. (The BPD’s Ford, who confirms Shah was detained in the A-1 station, declined to comment about the incident, saying, "It was all Secret Service. They came to us and requested assistance. We provided it.")

After an additional 45 minutes, Shah handed over his Ohio driver’s license, which precipitated his release. Nearly three hours had passed. As he exited the station from the rear door, Shah took in his surroundings once again — the sunshine, the traffic, the protesters. "It all seemed so surreal," he says. "I wondered, ‘What does one do after being falsely detained? Get an ice-cream cone?’"