Chapter Text
He-d'ho!
I want to call here the ancestors. I want to call here the ancestors of my people. They're in my heart; I carry them with me. Their hands are on my back when I talk. They keep me from falling. I think of them often, here, where the only soil from the land of my birth is that held in a bag which Starfleet regulation does not permit me to carry.
My legal name is Joseph Chakotay. My father was a meda, medicine man, among Potawatomi, first in Oklahoma and later on a colony world which lies now in the de-militarized zone between Federation space and the Cardassian Empire. My mother was Hopi and Dine (Navajo) and Nee Me Poo (Nez Perce), born in Arizona. She it was who gave me the name Chakotay. When I came of age, my father named me Peshewa. Wildcat. Starfleet gave me the name Joseph, and how I got that was something of a joke.
Potawatomi and Wea and Shawnee; Hopi and Navajo and Nez Perce; even a bit of Crow and Aztec. Spanish and French and Bengali, too. I have in me the blood of most of North America, and a little of Europe and the Indian subcontinent. These are my ancestors. Their hands are on my back; they keep me from falling.
When I was a boy, I was not much concerned with my ancestors. I spent my life with my nose in a book and my mind in the stars; I lived unconnected to the Earth, or to the bones of my people who lay in it. When I went away to the Academy, I put on a cadet's uniform and packed away my medicine bag so I could go about as naked as the rest, just another cadet, not son of the meda. You see, we Indians have our version of "PK"s, too. I was as rebellious at sixteen as any preacher's kid I've ever met. I lived separated from myself, my bag in a bottom drawer of my standard-issue dresser, an embarrassment in leather. But my earth lay in it, my grounding, the root of my soul. It was many years before I understood that, like a plant cut off from soil and water, I was dying.
Now here I am, a little less than seventy lightyears from the soil of my birth, and I don't even know how to mark the Directions. In space, it's rather meaningless, I suppose: north, south, east, and west. And yet it has the greatest of meanings precisely where its literal meaning fades. But then, I might say that of life in general. I find myself when I'm coming apart. Experience holds the greatest meaning when it appears to hold the least. This is why we tell stories: to understand who we are when our lives are coming apart. Therefore, I will tell you a story.
***
Recycled air has a smell that is no smell: flat, like stale beer or dull chrome. And artificial light strains the eyes and stunts the senses, but one never seems to notice until one stands under a sun again. At this point, I was wishing for a sun and fresh air. Any sun would do, even the orange one of 40 Eridani. But then, I'm partial to Vulcan; the wide sky reminds me of Arizona where my mother was born, even if the color is all wrong.
I was walking down the corridor outside the mess hall, thinking of yellow suns—or orange ones. The most incredible crash halted my progress. It sounded as if good Neelix had opened a pantry full of precarious pots which had immediately collapsed atop him. Backtracking three steps, I walked through the door. The smell of hot oil flowed out around me into the corridor.
It was not Neelix in the kitchen. It was Tuvok. Tuvok in an apron to keep off the grease, spoon in one hand, measuring-cup full of what looked like yogurt in the other.
I nearly turned and walked out again. Tuvok makes me uncomfortable. Partly it's because he's a Vulcan and while I may like their desert, I've never been quite comfortable around Vulcans. Partly it's because he and the captain have known one another so long. Sometimes I wonder who's the First Officer on Voyager: him or me. Insecurity, I realize, but there it is. Yet he also makes me uncomfortable because he made a fool of me and I'm proud enough for that to be painful. He was doing his duty; I know this. In his shoes, I might have done much the same. But humiliation is humiliation and I'm not sure it's something I can ever quite forgive. So that day, I nearly walked out. I didn't perhaps because I felt the hands of my ancestors on my back and they held me up.
At the whoosh of door, Tuvok had looked over. "Commander."
"Lieutenant." I glanced around. There were no piled pots in evidence. "Uh, did I...." I stopped; his eyebrow was up in that way he had: a mixture of patient impatience, and humor at human foibles. "Nevermind." He returned his attention to the skillet. "What are you making?"
"Besan Kadhi." He poured the yogurt into the skillet and stirred. I glanced in. The stuff was yellow with tumeric; I could smell its scent.
"I didn't know tumeric was a Vulcan spice."
"It is not," he said, having completely missed the jest. "Nor is the dish a Vulcan dish."
"What is it? Indian?"
"Indeed."
"Where did you learn to cook Indian?" What I wanted to ask him was where he had learned to cook at all. Tuvok had never struck me as the sort to tie on aprons and wave wood spoons in the air.
"My wife," he said.
There was a stool in the corner. I had seen Kes perch on it in the past while she watched Neelix concoct his strange concoctions. Pulling it over, I sat down. I really should have been concluding my tour, but this was too interesting. Tuvok continued to stir the skillet mixture. "So where did your wife learn? I assume she's Vulcan, not Terran."
"My wife spent some time in New Delhi, with a Terran dance- company. They were performing a modern ballet based on the Bhagavad Gita."
"Ah." I leaned into the counter. The smell of food was
making my stomach growl. "That's right, your wife's a dancer. Her name's T'Pel, right?"
"That is correct." He plopped a plateful of puffy-looking dumplings into the yogurt mix.
"Why are you cooking your own dinner?"
Head lowered, only his eyes moved to look at me. "I wished something...edible."
I howled; I couldn't help it. He had not meant to be funny. Tuvok's sense of humor was amputated at birth, I think—and not just because of his culture. I've met funny Vulcans. They always pretend they don't mean to be, but it's perfectly evident that they do. The only way Tuvok is funny is when he doesn't mean to be. Like now. He stood staring at me for the briefest moment, then returned to stirring the bubbling mass in the skillet. I could almost hear him think, 'Humans!'
After a moment he pulled the skillet free. Clearly he was ready to eat. I stood, meaning to go. I had not, in fact, meant to stay so long in the first place and could not have said why I had. Now, as if drawn by the same inexplicable motivation, he said, "There is enough of this for two." His face remained impassive but a muscle in one cheek twitched. I remembered all the times I had seen him, shoveling in food absently while he read a booktape.
He's lonely, I thought. I don't know why it had never occurred to me before. Vulcans seem so damned self-sufficient, islands unto themselves. But he was the only Vulcan on this ship, the only one of his people for parsecs and parsecs. And if I felt disconnected from my ancestors, at least I was on a ship where ninety percent of the people had blood the same color as mine. Nor had I left a wife and children behind me, either.
"It's been years since I had Indian food that didn't come out of a replicator," I told him. "I'd be honored."
"It is, of course, without meat."
"I don't mind," I said. He measured out brown rice into two bowls, poured the Besan Kadhi over the top.