I took a deep breath to steady myself. I’d been wanting to make this call for so many weeks and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted to talk to my mum, to know that she and Dad were missing me. I wanted Mum to tell me to come home. I had this fantasy that she would say: “Stay right where you are, putt, we’re coming to get you.” Putt means darling. My dad used to say it to me sometimes.

It was just after 7pm. I knew Mum would be in the kitchen at our house in Derby, stirring something on the cooker. I could almost feel the heat and smell the turmeric. Lucy, my younger sister, would be watching telly. I wondered if the teachers at school had asked her where I was.

Dad would have gone to the foundry.Had he told his friends about me running away? They’d know anyway, of course; in the two months since I’d left home the gossip would have filtered through from our Sikh temple, the gurdwara. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him too badly.

I could feel the courage draining out of me as I lifted the receiver. Mum answered almost immediately. “Mum, it’s me . . .”

She was off straight away, screaming and crying down the phone: “How could you do this? You’ve shamed us. Why should we suffer this disgrace?” I was crying, too, but I managed to say: “Mum, you know why I left.”

She wouldn’t have that. “I hope you have a daughter who does to you what you have done to me, then you’ll know what it feels like to raise a prostitute.”

“I’ll come back, Mum. But I won’t marry that man. I’m only just 16. I want to live my own life. I want to go to college.”

“Live your own life then, and good luck to you. In our eyes you’re dead!” She slammed the phone down.

My legs seemed to give way beneath me, and I crouched on the floor of the phone box, choking on my sobs. Had I really done something so terrible that my parents could disown me? Had they really stopped loving me? Was it such a crime to want my own life?

WHEN we were little there were four of us in our bed: me, Lucy, Robina and Yasmin, sleeping two at the top and two at the bottom. There were three other girls in our family. Bachanu, my half-sister, in India; Prakash in London; and Ginda, about 10 years older than me, who slept in the other bed in our room. She looked after us while Mum was at work.

My brother Balbir slept in the other bedroom. He was treated completely differently from us girls. Mum would prepare his food and wash his clothes. We were expected to wash our own clothes, get our school uniforms ready and get our food.

I was about seven when I started asking why everything was different for Balbir. Then I questioned other aspects of our life. If Sikhs think everyone is equal, why do we look down on people of a lower caste? The gurdwara near our house was — and to me still is — the local gossip shop.

“Have you heard Hasina’s daughter-in-law has had another girl? I think Hasina is really regretting that match.”