Review | 'Little America' Season Two brings home stories of hope

A still from the show 'Little America'.

The first time you come across the Welsh word "hiraeth" and it seeps down to your heart and jangles a nerve you thought was deadened, you have to put the book down or step away from your screen and look out of the window so that you can look inwards. Perhaps, a walk across the concrete jungle to a strange watering hole where you won’t find a single pair of eyes that light up upon seeing you. Surrounded by strangers, you try to figure out what home really is.

No poem by Gulzar or a pithy quote by Rumi is any salve to that question that whines away within: Do I really belong here?

Kumail Nanjiani is not just a darned good comic actor, he came to his own with the drama The Big Sick (2017), which he co-created with his wife Emily V Gordon. This duo teams up with Lee Eisenberg (of The Office fame) to bring us eight stories from people just like you and I. Immigrants who are trying to find their own corner in paradise

Is it paradise though? A Sri Lankan girl swallows casual racism and spends over 39 hours kissing a car between a panic attack and feelings of inadequacy. Is it worth giving up a life as a chemical engineer in your own country to give your children a better life and ending up as a janitor in the country of dreams?

But for every Sachini, there is a young man who dares to give up the dream of his parents, the promise of a safe job as a doctor to join art school and then give up on that too because he doesn’t like the fakeness of it all. He ends up becoming a successful milliner in Detroit.

Each of these stories touches a chord. Tickles a nerve ending that will make you weep, and sigh and then laugh. Not all stories are heartwarming though. There are ones that  will push you down into a darkness with which you are altogether familiar.

Is the struggle worth the loss? An episode where a 12-year-old, whose parents have been deported to India, will make you reach out for a box of tissues or get a sudden case of sniffles. The lad from Nigeria and his discovery of kindred spirits (or not) will make you sing the hosannas and become a believer even if your eyes are moist.

Stories of affirmation, uplifting and inspirational that are not cloyingly sentimental or manipulative even. But you know that they help you rediscover the milk of human kindness which will, in turn, aid you to look at fellow immigrants — no matter where you are located geographically — differently. After all, you may want to treat someone who is running scared of the authorities kindly. And instead of exploiting their weakness, help. You’re human, and these stories rub those edges away, and you discover home is where you lay your head. Hiraeth is perhaps just a made-up word.