Midway through Kohrra 2, a scene inside the police station shows the desk of young police constable Aujla. It is cluttered with case files, documents and snacks. A blink-and-miss shot reveals a couple of IELTS preparation books among them.AdvertisementThe small visual cue draws no attention, no dialogue. Yet, it says everything about how the second season of the crime drama series embeds migration — both distress-driven and aspirational — into everyday lives in Punjab.Kohrra 2 embodies Punjab’s bidirectional migration profile: A destination for inter-state migrant workers from Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh while simultaneously being a source region for global migration to Canada, the US and the UK.The murder victim lived in the United States along with her hotelier husband and children, whose “whole lives are there”. Their young live-in nanny sends remittance money to educate her brother in rural Punjab.AdvertisementThen there is Arun, a young migrant worker from Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh, who has come to Punjab searching for his father, a man who had himself migrated to the state 20 years earlier. And, there are the unnamed bonded labourers who die in a farm fire, their journeys having started as migrants seeking work. For some, the “push” factor is distress and survival. For others, the pull is aspiration. The season’s most powerful moments emerge when these two worlds collide.On the back of the Green Revolution, Punjab witnessed an influx of migrant workers who filled the labour demand created by the agriculture boom. Over the years, Punjab’s agrarian economy has relied heavily on inter-state migrant workers who have also found employment in manufacturing, industry and service delivery.Through the sub-plot of Arun and his father — a story that spans over two decades — the series depicts the angst and devastating impacts of distress migration on both workers and their families. Arun’s own experience is no different: An informal worker at a food cart facing punitive wage cuts and being homeless on cold winter nights.you may likeThe 2023 Global Slavery Index estimates that on any given day in 2021, there were more than 11 million people living in modern slavery in India, the highest number of any country. Punjab has India’s highest proportion of Dalit population, and caste remains a primary driver of who migrates under duress and who gets trapped in bonded labour. Traffickers often target individuals from vulnerable backgrounds, often through intermediaries and agents. Employers operate with a sense of impunity, justifying exploitation as generational practice.While the season underlines the vulnerabilities of such workers, it also shows migration as a means to do something better. For cop Amarpal Garundi, that means a fresh start — a new posting and a chance to leave his past behind. The series also suggests that his wife may be dreaming further. A poster of Machu Picchu on the bedroom cupboard, glimpsed briefly and never mentioned, like the IELTS book, does the rest.What makes Kohrra 2 unusual is not that it includes migrant characters but that it never frames migration as exceptional. It is the unremarked way of life in this part of Punjab — as ambient as the winter fog the show is named after. And much like that fog, it hides in plain sight: On a cluttered desk, or a cupboard’s wallpaper.The writer is a Delhi-based independent journalist