GLIMMER OF LIGHT

Ramandeep is a ten year old girl, Indian, of Sikh religion, arriving in Italy when she was four with her mother who came to Italy to rejoin her husband. She remembers nothing of the Punjab, the native land of her father who emigrated to Italy to the Padana Plain six years before his wife to work as a milker of cows on a farm where Italian farm-workers, by now extinct, once lived. She is happy to live in the country because, as she says, she likes the “silent landscapes”. She says, however, that after a holiday in the Punjab, after having contacted her father’s land again, she came back to Italy full of questions…giving rise to a comparison between her country of origin and the one that has given her hospitality and feels her own. She goes, therefore, to the guru of the Sikh temple of Vescovato in the province of Cremona to seek answers to her questions. Principles of respect for other cultures, other religions and the biodiversity of nature emerge from the guru’s stories. The girl discovers that previously she had had these thoughts alone, precisely those thoughts, without knowing it, in listening silently to the sound landscape of the countryside as she says “when the machines stop”, on the River Po.