He just wishes that he hadn’t had his camera with him that day.”I still haven’t had that camera back and I don’t think I want it back,” he joked during a telephone interview with me from inside the prison last week. “The FBI agents still have it.”Mahmood acknowledged that there have been dark times. Mahmood was whisked to Hudson’s police station and interrogated about his visit to the water plant. What was he doing? What was his connection to September 11?No terror charges were ever filed against Mahmood. But a search of his apartment revealed that he had helped out a local Pakistani couple who had overstayed their visas. He spotted a security guard and asked if he would take a snap of him with the mountains in the background.

What he did not know was that the picture would also take in some of the facility. It was Hudson’s main water treatment plant and he had just made the worst mistake of his life.Soon after Mahmood returned to his modest apartment the police arrived, tipped off by the security guard. These were the days when America, barely recovered from the first attacks, was in the thrall of anthrax scares across the country. On his pizza round he paused whenever he could to take pictures, planning to send them home to his family in Punjab. He had just delivered to a home on Rossman Avenue in Hudson, a street offering the best views anywhere in town, when his customer suggested he walk further up the hill to take more pictures.

There, he was told, the vista across the river to the Catskill Mountains to the west was superb As, indeed, it is.Mahmood took the advice. At the end of the avenue he saw some official looking buildings behind a chain-link fence. More recently, seven members of the US Senate, including Hillary Clinton, have joined the fight on his behalf.Today, Mahmood finds that he has become the single most powerful symbol of something that went terribly awry inside the United States in the months after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. In an atmosphere of paranoia, the country rounded up almost 800 foreign-born nationals – most of them from the Middle East and Pakistan – and interrogated them on the very flimsiest of suspicions that they may have had ties to terrorists.

Mahmood was one of those apprehended.On that autumn day, Mahmood was mesmerised by the colours of the season. His tale has been less an American Dream and more an American Nightmare.Everything was right with Mahmood’s world until one bright day in October 2001. That was when he started a new and most unwelcome journey that today has still not come to an end Fortunately, however, his travails have not been ignored. The City of Hudson, a picturesque town about 100 miles north of New York City where he was living and doing his pizza rounds, has many liberal-minded and politically-aware residents who have rallied to his cause. Of those four years since his arrival in the States, more than two and a half have been spent behind bars. Yet, there is one reason why you might imagine that his love affair with Uncle Sam would have soured by now. Through a huge stroke of luck, he was picked in America’s annual Green Card lottery four years ago, winning the right to immigrate here and leave his native Pakistan.