By Sofia HayatAs I read those words, my first instinct wasn't fear or even shock, but simply survival.
I'd become accustomed to behaviour like this from both my parents - behaviour that anyone else would find abhorrent - and I was emotionally numb to their threats.
But I also knew that my sister's warning was deadly serious and my life was in real danger. I'd been in hiding for several weeks when I received the text.
I was born in Gravesend in Kent in 1974 and brought up there in a devout Muslim family with three sisters and two brothers.
My father Zammurrad, a factory worker, was a deeply religious man but violent towards my mother Surriya and my sisters Zarqa, now 38, Saira, 33, and Tahira, 32.
I tried to be an obedient daughter, praying up to five times a day, but I never felt loved by my parents - or that I really belonged.
In turn, my parents viewed me as something of an oddity. Perhaps it was because I loved performing.
From as young as five, acting and singing was in my blood and at school I won so many competitions for writing songs that if the teachers wanted a song for an assembly they'd ask me to write one and I'd get up on stage and sing it.
My love of singing and dancing wasn't exactly encouraged at home, but it wasn't a big problem when I was young. But as I hit my teens, my parents told me I could no longer continue.
I was to forget my childish fantasies of becoming an actress, as in their eyes singing and dancing were on a par with prostitution.
As I grew older, my father started placing increasingly severe restrictions on my life. I was forbidden from making friends with other children and lived a very lonely existence.
On the one occasion I was given special permission to attend a birthday party of a girl who lived 100 metres down the road, I was allowed to stay for only an hour. My life was just school and home, with no free time for myself.
Read more: Mail Online
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