At 53, researcher Rona Wilson is trying to pick up the pieces of the life he was forced to leave behind when he was arrested in the contentious Bhima Koregaon case six years and seven months ago.

His hair is greying, perhaps the most visible physical change since he was put in jail. Still intact, though, is his quiet smile. “The sense of time I lost is slowly sinking in,” he said on Friday, four days after he walked out of Navi Mumbai’s Taloja jail after fulfilling the conditions on which he had been granted bail.

“In prison, whether you like it or not, tea and food is coming at a specific time. Everything is in order,” he said. “Now that I am out, I am left on my own.”

To begin with, since his bail conditions do not allow him to leave Mumbai, he is trying to find an affordable home to rent in the expensive city.

Wilson and Dalit rights activist Sudhir Dhawale were granted on January 8 after the Bombay High Court acknowledged that they had spent a long time in jail without trial or even the charges against them being framed.

Wilson, the public relations secretary of the Committee for Release of Political Prisoners, had been...