Sahil Maqbool winces through his tender smile with the kind of vulnerability typically seen in people who have endured either great public humiliation or private tragedy. In his case it’s been a heavy dosage of both. The 44-year-old Kashmiri journalist and poet says he was deceived by men he trusted, thrown in jail, and, according to him, brutally tortured after his arrest on Sept. 16, 2004. Mr. Maqbool had been making his living as an investigative journalist in India’s troubled region of Kashmir. “I lost everything,” Mr. Maqbool says from the lobby of a houseboat in Srinagar, the morning sun beating down on Dal Lake behind him. “I lost my sources, my contacts. You can appreciate the importance of such things. I even lost my family home that I had been maintaining for years. My camera. Laptop. Passport. Everything. Gone.”