It’s the fourth day of Ramadan in the month of May. It’s 10.30 in the morning and the temperature in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, is soaring at 27 °C.

When she was a young child, my mother, who is Belgian, developed a profound fascination with India and all things Indian.

Think of the word ‘refugee’. What kind of image surfaces in your mind?

A poem by Farid Bitar

An estimated 12.7 million tons of plastic – everything from bottles and bags to microbeads – end up in our oceans each year. That’s a truck load of rubbish a minute.

It had been billed as ‘Rebellion Day’ by the organisers, a group called Extinction Rebellion that no-one I knew had heard of. Now, after blocking off roads in four major locations in London for over a week, racking up more than 1,000 arrests in the process, lots of people have heard of them.

Imagine a valley where orange trees nestle among gnarled, millennia-old olives; where figs, mulberries and pomegranates hang heavy with juice.