We’re continuing our series on the 2021 Gold Medal Portfolio Award winners with artist Maximo Guerra and writer Keerthi Lakshmanan.

Maximo’s passion is to create art that leads to the “betterment of others,” so he incorporates social issues “such as global warming and homelessness” into his art. The works in Keerthi’s writing portfolio explore “what it can mean to be a child of America—and how this country does not always constitute a happy ending for every one of its citizens.”

Maximo Guerra

“The idea behind it piece is to poke fun/satirical on the background of each piece. The portfolio concentrates on the theme of space, by creating architectural designs integrated within my architectural work. Space throughout my concept revolves around people who seek residency. The theme of space that surrounds an individual intrigued me because, just like my theme, I’ve dealt with seeking space and not having a place to call home.”

Keerthi Lakshmanan

“When I think of myself, I am American-made . . . The pieces in my portfolio aim to represent different aspects of that identity. The protagonists in each work cross age and genre. They each demonstrate a distinct, compelling voice—but at some point in their stories, they suffer from a lack of a control regarding themselves or their circumstances. There are always external factors that become overwhelming and force characters to face new questions . . . They represent my experiences as a female, a first-generation immigrant, as a teenager growing up influenced by the enchanting ideal of the American Dream.”

On the Pyre

Keerthi Lakshmanan, Short Story. Grade 12, Cupertino High School, Cupertino, CA. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Writing Portfolio

Everybody’s parents have a story. The story of what they did so you could be born here. Yours used to say they packed up their lives in two suitcases.

But they forgot the rest, that two suitcases can hold an awful lot—that they brought your ancestors with them, ghosts stuffed between the pure gold bangles and collared shirts.

****

YOU, long after the end.

Ashes drift on the wind.

Opening your windows, you drink it in, as you do each morning—the collapsed buildings blanketed in layers of thick soot and cinder. Dead vegetation scatters underfoot, leached of color, the skeletons of trees blocking the asphalt roads cracked beyond oblivion. The sky stretches gray past the horizon; you smile faintly at the taste of sulfur on your tongue. (You are the only person alive here.)

The days pass slowly. You liked it once, but the chores grew tiresome and doubled each year—the vents in your rundown house clog with ash, and the ceiling needs to be patched each week, but your back aches too much to do either lately.

Your path to your kitchen is blocked by the sudden appearance of a young man. He wears a soft red kurta, simple cotton, with beat-up slippers and a lopsided grin on his face. He looks a bit like your father. Maybe. If you squint. The man pats ashes off his shoulders with calloused brown palms.

You sigh.

He smiles fully then, with yellowed, crooked teeth. “Are you busy, child?”

“Does it matter?” Child, your visitors always call you. It pisses you off just as much as it used to—doesn’t help that you’re nearing fifty years old, now.

He wanders around your house absentmindedly, toying with the lamps and couch cushions. On the mantel lies a vintage box radio. The dials are sprung loose and wires stick out the rear. His eyes light in recognition before he twists a dial and claps in satisfaction when music crackles to life.

You roll your eyes. You don’t ask when he died. Or how. You don’t care.

The music comes giddy and sweet, a hip-swaying rhythm weighed down with radio static. Your ancestor cocks his head, listening, and then hums along. The song is foreign to you. It isn’t in English. (Ah, you knew his language, once. Your grandmother whispered it into your crib.)

“Dance with me,” he says.

“I don’t know your dances. And I’m too old for that.”

“I’m certainly older.”

“Well, you’re dead. Bit of an advantage there.”

Your ancestor of perhaps a century ago laughs. He offers a hand. “Teach me one of yours.”

Positioning his hands at your waist, you rest your hands on his shoulders, enjoying the look of mild confusion on his face. You show him how to twirl you in pace with the beat and keep his feet off your toes.

When the radio crackles and changes songs, it is slower, and you settle into a gentle sway.

At last, he asks, “What is this place, child? You live like this?”

“Seems so.”

“All alone?”

“Yes.”

“You do not miss anyone?”

You rest your head on his shoulder. Listening to the bones of the music, you measure your breathing with its counts. You try to forget that he isn’t breathing, his chest still against yours.

“We all make mistakes,” he begins.

“It wasn’t a mistake.”

“We only want the best from you. Is this so terrible? For us to love you so?”

“Is it love?” Drowsiness tugs at your voice.

“We are family. Family is all you have in the end.”

“Hush.”

“Will you ignore us like this forever?”

“Another moment.”

“We need you.” His voice grows insistent.

“Just one more minute—”

“You must carry on our legacy, child.”

The music is fading in your ears and you sway to a beat that isn’t there, clinging fast. “One more dance.”

He pushes you apart. “You have to stop this. You have to fix this place. You belong to us. We are your family.” Softer: “You need us too.”

“Not anymore,” you tell him.

His face twists into a snarl. “You would rather rot by yourself? We sacrificed our lives for you to have this world, and this is what you have done to it? You are shameless. You’re nothing.”

Light-headed, you crumble into your couch, your joints creaking, your body turning to ice without the warmth of his embrace. You are rotting. You are decaying as surely as the burnt buildings about you.

“Just go.” Your eyelids slip closed. “Please.”

Much later, when you rise, he has disappeared. He is the two hundred and fourth of your ancestors to visit you in your valley of ashes.

****

YOU, in the end.

Then you’re on an open highway skipping high school in your friend’s car and your body is halfway through the sunroof, arms stretching above your head, your midriff bare and hips pretty and the wind like firecrackers sparking across your burning, feverish skin and you laugh and laugh and laugh even though you feel so hot you can hardly breathe through it, your vision blurring at the edges.

You’re going somewhere far away.

Your friend is flooring the gas. Keep going. Faster, faster. The road will end soon. This car will crash eventually. The sky scorches your reaching fingertips—the world blazes quick and wide in your peripherals, nothing true about it—and the end of the highway beckons, coaxes you closer. (This is the moment, you know, your ancestors will never forgive you for.) Keep going.

You’re going somewhere far, far away.

You won’t come back.

****

YOU, before the end.

The American suburbs, if you’re honest, remind you of a cemetery. Cemeteries are curious places—the pristine flowers, the tidy lines of gravestones and stone paths threading through healthy grass. In your culture the dead are cremated; your version of death is smoke curling from the pyre, the cracking of wood. But cemeteries are silent, and they look pretty. Your neighborhood is much the same. There are family names on picket fences and a neat little order to suburban houses, numbered rows and gardens and people to keep it that way.

Though, your family’s name isn’t on your house. You’d probably need too big a sign. It would ruin the symmetry of this place. Night falls and the street lights are faint as you wander down your road. A moment of air, underneath fainter stars.

It is not a moment of peace, however, because a figure solidifies suddenly in front of you: a young woman draped in a crimson sari. Her hair glistens, braided and tucked with flowers, her limbs and neck dripping with gold jewelry. Maybe she’s from a few centuries ago?

“Oh!” You stifle a scream. She arches a brow. “Hi.”

“This is the new world?” she muses, by way of greeting. Your ancestor gives a cursory glance to the suburbs. “Interesting. You’re growing quick, child.”

“I’m thirteen.”

Her anklets jingle. “Are you studying well?”

I blink. “You sound like Mama.”

“Listen closely, little one,” she says. You’re new to this, and curious, so you do. Her mouth tightens. “Your mother crossed continents for you. Do you want to know what she sees when she looks at you?”

You realize, belatedly, that you have already made a mistake.

“She sees all her regrets. She sees the marriage garland placed around her neck and the textbooks she sold to afford plane tickets. She emigrated and named you her eldest daughter, to raise you in a place where you would not follow her path. You are only the product of what we sacrificed,” says your ancestor, stepping close. “The very first of our blood to be born in a country where you’ll be a free girl, with opportunity and choice.” The last word is spat. She tucks a strand of your hair behind your ear. “So if we tell you to study harder, you should do it, no? Are we asking so much?”

It’s taking every scrap of will to stay rooted. “No.”

“Good. We gifted you so much potential, didn’t we? Do not make us regret you.”

The reason you hate the suburbs is because, like a cemetery, it makes you forget there is death underneath your feet. At least—a death for you. You can’t be as perfect as these houses, as this lifestyle; you can’t keep killing yourself in pursuit of it forever.

“What if I can’t?” you say, hesitantly. “I know you want the best from me, but what if that’s impossible? You don’t know this country. None of you do.”

Her eyes darken. “I don’t know? Then you know everything, do you? You are a child. You know life better than us? Your ancestors, your kin? Do you want to die like I did, like a wife?”

“No, but—” Your protest dies off as you realize her finery isn’t a mark of ancient times. It’s her bridal sari.

There’s a pain in her voice, one that you’re beginning to understand. “Then do what I ask. We will give you your dreams; don’t follow your own.”

“I’m sorry.”(You should have asked her to leave. But you didn’t know, when you were this young, that they’d listen.)

Your ancestor’s face softens almost imperceptibly. “My child,” she says, gentler, sweeter. “Make me proud.”

She is the fifth of your ancestors to visit you in your picture-perfect suburbs.

****

There is one part of your life your ancestors will never understand. Eventually, your long name and skin color will catch up to you. You could keep studying and striving and applying until you are flesh hanging off bones, you could be the greatest chemist or politician or engineer or educator or other things you don’t really want to be but here’s what a few more years taught you: your country does not care about you. Your country does not care about a little brown-skinned girl when she has tongue and wit enough for any ambition.

But where else will you go? You’re American. But America will treat you as an Indian, no matter how many languages you do not know.

Your ancestors didn’t tell you that. They didn’t know. They didn’t tell you that they’d doomed you before you were even born. They didn’t say, “your skin will mean too much and nothing at all”, and they didn’t say, “they’ll hate you if you embrace us but we’ll hate you if you leave us behind,” and that no matter what you chose, you would hate yourself for choosing it. You grew tired of fighting. You grew tired of earning the privilege to breathe when it was a right for others; you were exhausted of struggling, tooth and nail, to be seen as equal, and then denied this, too, because everyone says the margins are invisible but that doesn’t mean the barriers don’t exist.

Then all you wanted to do were the useless things. You wanted to play soccer and lip-sync songs in the shower. You wanted to have your heart broken and sleep past noon and forget your responsibilities. (Oh, but your mother did say, you’re ruining my life. Your father did say, you’re a disappointment.) That became the reality of your desires (not the truth of them), and it scared you, how quickly you changed.

In your dreams, you do not have family. In your dreams, you are godless and bloodless and tethered to absolutely nothing.

In your dreams, there is no one to tell you otherwise. There is no one to lift your chin and tell you how much they sacrificed for you to be born, that you must you must you MUST be better be smarter; in your dreams, the success of your existence is not hand-in-hand with the suffering of a thousand ancestors on a separate continent. You do not owe your life to faces you can’t recognize and languages you don’t speak and gods you’ll never worship.

So you decided.

There will always be more brown-skinned girls with as many dreams hammering in their skulls as you, but there is nothing worse to be in your world than a dreamer. You’d rather the next generation of girls were born downright foolish, but they won’t, because no girl is a fool, we are only ever broken.

Would you let us suffer, too?

No. No. No. No more. No more. NO MORE

You wanted the world at your knees. You wanted to own it, and then break it. (This is what it means, to be a brown girl sick of losing. This is what it means to be a first-generation child with foreign ghosts and modern dreams and no prayers to rely on; this is what it means to depend entirely on the intelligence you cultivate and the magnitude of your sacrifices.)

So you looked your pantheon of dusty ancestors in the eyes, one by one, and you burnt the world to fucking cinders.

****

YOU, in the beginning after the end.

When it’s newly destroyed, your world collapses into an eternity of smog so thick and dark it blacks out the sun. The remnants of your fires roar themselves out in the distance. Your stupid goddamn suburbs lie in the wreckage and sunken brick, asphalt streets burst open into chalk and rubble, street-side lamps torched into twisted scraps of metal, everything you hated eaten and destroyed from the inside out.

It is devastatingly silent. You grin. Land of the free.

Lacing up your boots, you head out into the apocalypse, in search of water or an intact mattress. You consider whistling.

“Hey!” A young, shrill voice cuts the air.

Wincing, you peer over your shoulder and find your ancestor is a tiny girl this time, with oiled black hair in braids and a school uniform. Her eyes are wet and her nose reddens in irritation from the smoky air quality.

Facing forward, you sigh. “What are you, like four?”

She hacks and coughs behind you. “I’m ten!”

You pick up your pace between burning tires and overturned trucks and she bumbles in pursuit, occasionally tripping over debris.

“Wait!” You don’t. “Why did you destroy everything?”

“I felt like it.”

“Answer me!”

“I just did.”

“You’re ruining my life.” The girl yanks on your sleeve, sniveling. “You’re ruining all our lives. You’ll reduce us to nothing!” She’s the first to visit you here in your peace. Maybe your ancestors sent a little girl on purpose. Did they think that would sway you?

Then she says, “You’re wasting your potential!” and this wipes the mirth from your face.

“Did they tell you to say that?” You shove her back. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“Please. You can fix this. You can put out the fires. You can go back.” Even as she pleads, her eyes are wide with fear. Fear of you. Of what you’ve done.

Smoke curls in the distance.

You say, “No. I can’t.”

There are skeletons beneath you, barely concealed within the shifting sea of underfoot ash. The girl hasn’t heard the skulls splitting as you walk, bone popping with a sound like firecrackers on the soles of your boots. You don’t care about those lives. You don’t care about your life and your ancestors are dead anyway. Your potential is empty in a world that will never love you for the uncontrollable, your skin, your name, your blood. Your potential crumbles to ash in the impossibility of how much your family would take from you. It doesn’t matter. You never had anything to begin with.

“Do you regret me yet?” The little girl pales. “Get out,” you say, and she vanishes.

In the decades afterward, dozens more of your ancestors appear to speak with you. Each of them varies in appearance and age but never their message. Your ancestors demand you to fix it. They plead with you to reverse your damage, to fall in line again, to kiss your forehead to the earth, and admit you are sorry for your phases. They say you must rebuild your burnt-out world, that you can do it right this time–if only you had just obeyed—that you can be glorious. (Maybe even happy.)

But nothing grows from ash. You knew this. You burned your world alive anyway.

It is a shame, however, that you cannot seem to ignore your ancestors entirely. (They will haunt you forever. Part of you knew this, too.)

Ah, well.

You breathe in your destruction. You can live now. Just live. Live, live until you die. Live.

****

YOU, as you are.

You can’t talk to your grandma because she speaks Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi, but you speak English. She piles food on your plate with a soft smile.

Your own grandmother, with a soft jaw and broad nose, that smile kin to yours. Her wrinkles are etched into your knuckles, the skin of her throat along the soles of your feet. But you don’t know her. Not truly. She speaks over your head, to your parents.

(If your ancestors were to appear, your blood would howl and thrum at the sight of them because it would recognize the brown skin and full-lipped faces, because like calls to like—and you were made from them, one and the same. You would think, finally, I am not so alone in this country. But if your dead family were to open their mouths only foreign words would spill out, syllables too knotted and gnarled for your ungrateful ears.)

Maybe she says that she loves you. Or maybe she’s cursing you. Or blessing you with her indifference. You sit quietly and eat. The rice tastes like ash on your tongue.

Featured image: Maximo Guerra, Rich vs Poor Stereotype, Painting. Grade 12, Design and Architecture Senior High, Miami, FL. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Art Portfolio

To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.