How might one analyze the poem "Postcard from Kashmir," by Agha Shahid Ali?

In Agha
Shahid Alis poem titled Postcard from Kashmir, the speaker describes receiving a postcard from
his native land, Kashmir, a region of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of Kashmir are controlled
by India, Pakistan, and China, and in fact disputes between India and Pakistan about the
territory are long-standing and have often led to armed conflict.

In the
opening two lines of the poem, the speaker indicates that the postcard contains a photograph of
(part of) Kashmir, a place the speaker still considers his home (2). Apparently he is very
geographically distant from Kashmir, a fact that makes his use of the word home ironic. He may
have been born in Kashmir and may have lived there for much of his life, but now he is
apparently living somewhere else, perhaps even in some Western country such as the United
Kingdom or the United States.

In any case, the speaker next mentions that he
always loved neatness €“ a trait that emphasizes thethat he can now hold the half-inch
Himalayas in my hand (4). The massive mountain range has been reduced to a small, tidy picture,
which is surely not the kind of neatness the speaker truly desires. One of the most impressive
aspects of his homeland has thus been shrunken and made to seem far less impressive and
significant. Although the speaker holds the postcard, he has in more literal ways lost touch
with the land he loves.

Perhaps the most intriguing and puzzling lines of the
poem are these:

This is home. And this the closest

I'll ever be to home. . . . (5-6)

Does the
speaker mean that Kashmir is home? If so, why does he say that this is the closest he will
ever be to home? One might assume that he means that he is unable to return to Kashmir, and so
the postcard must suffice as a poor substitute for an actual visit. In the very next phrase,
however, the speaker seems to contemplate an inevitable return (6).  Therefore, when he says
This is home, does he mean the unnamed place where he currently resides, which seems a poor
substitute for his actual home of Kashmir? The phrasing of lines 5-6 is not entirely clear and
contributes an interesting ambiguity to the poem.

The speaker assumes that
when he does actually return to Kashmir (in real life and not simply in his imagination), the
real sights of the place will not live up neither to the picture of them presented in the
postcard nor to the idealized memory of them in the speakers mind. In the poems closing lines,
the speaker suggests that his memory of Kashmir is unreliable and that Kashmir itself may be
like

. . . a giant negative, black
and white,
still undeveloped.  (13-14)

These lines €“ and especially
the last word €“ are suggestive. They may imply that Kashmir is still in the process of
development as a place, that it is at present still too polarized to live up either to the
speakers idealized memory of it or to the postcards idealized presentation of its
beauty.

Nevertheless, it does not seem a mere coincidence that the poem has
fourteen lines -- the number of lines associated with sonnets, which are themselves the kinds of
poems in which speakers often express unrequited love.