Funeral Chant

I felt ill the other morning, so I cancelled my language lesson and bummed around the apartment all morning. Eventually I couldn’t concentrate on anything and realized I needed some fresh air, so I stumbled outside and wandered around the neighborhood. I found a basketball court nearby! There are so many huge concrete buildings filled with people around me, it’s like each one has enough people for an entire village. Who are all these people? So many thousands alive here, so many thousands dead around the Indian Ocean... it’s still on my mind all the time. People are living and dying like crazy these days.

I wandered over to one of the new little churches that has sprung up among the concrete... and was surprised to see a lot of people hanging around. I was hoping for an empty church to stand quietly in, maybe sing a chant or two softly if no one was around. Most of the people looked young, so I guessed it was a wedding. I put on my stoic face and pretended to walk by quickly, so as not to be invited to any random wedding supras that my stomach couldn’t handle. But just as I was passing the church I heard chanting!

I glanced over at the church door, but the chanting was coming from outside. I honed in on three men standing outside, and as I approached, I recognized one of my favorite chants, Sulta tana aghsrulebulta. I don’t know what the words mean yet, but it is a six minute funeral chant, and I transcribed the whole thing from the Me Rustveli cd last summer.

I befriended these guys and they invited me into the funeral of an older lady, a friend’s mother. I stood with the chanters as the priest readied the service materials, and old ladies took their seats around the open coffin. The body was grey, the sheets white, flowers at head and feet. Candles. Soft sobs. It seemed entirely okay for me to be there, but nevertheless I hid myself in the corner behind a pillar next to the chanters.

The funeral chants have such a special quality here. They are made of silk, not glossy, but worn for comfort, faded with age, each line sagging deeper into the ground. The chants lifted our hearts up but brought our heads down, the sound was soft and mournful.

Funeral services last two and half hours I realized. My stomach recovered well, and I was hungry by the time we made it out of there. During the service, most people were not in the church, but filed in singly and in groups, passing around the coffin paying their respects to the survivors, lighting candles, and signing the cross.

Outside my mood was lifted to the sky when I sang one chant with the guys, and it locked in completely. They are excellent chanters, named Giorgi Tatarashvili and Alexandri Edzgveradze and sing at another church in the Didube district. This morning I made Luarsab get up early and go to their church with me because I didn’t know where it was. They let me sing with them for the first half of the service!