[cisfemale, she/her] Welcome to Aurora Bay, [PRIYA DESAI]! I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like [SIMONE ASHLEY]. You must be the [THIRTY] year old [WAITSTAFF AT THE ALL-NIGHTER DINER]. Word is you’re [RESILIENT] but can also be a bit [SCATHING] and your favorite song is [WOULD'VE COULD'VE SHOULD'VE BY TAYLOR SWIFT]. I also heard you’ll be staying in [SEABROOK QUARTER]. I’m sure you’ll love it!
tw: arranged marriage, tw: mental/emotional abuse, tw: gaslighting
Even from a young age, Priya knew she was the odd one out in her family. Her sister was the picture-perfect daughter– smart, funny, polite, and the perfect daughter for her parents who thought themselves socialites in the town. The Desai family emigrated from England to the states in the sixties and quickly laid down roots in California and then soon in Aurora Bay, the Desai's coming with a lot of money and helping to develop skyrises in and around the perfect little beach town. They all just easily fit right in with the wealth and class of the socialites in town.
The same absolutely couldn’t be said for Priya.
Instead of learning to sew and taking cooking classes like her sister, Priya liked to play outside, often coming home with scabby knees and scraped palms from climbing trees or racing too fast on her bike. She was loud and rambunctious and the absolute antithesis of her sister. She stayed much the same even into her teenaged years too. She’d sneak away from the stuffy parties her parents took her to, choosing to instead hang out with her friends even if it meant sitting in a park in a fancy dress. In cliché teenaged rebellion, when told she should act more ‘lady like’, she instead chopped her hair off til it barely even reached her chin, let her friends teach her how to skateboard, how to smoke and drink. Anything that upset her parents was exactly what Priya wanted to do.
That said though, she wasn’t too bad. She did decently in school and honestly, Priya wanted to make something of herself. She just didn’t believe that just because she wanted be more meant that she should be bland and complacent with her life and just sit there and be quiet and pretty.
It was during a conversation with her best friend (a boy: another point of contention with her parents) that she realized what she wanted to do with her life: she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to help people. Priya had broken her arm a few months prior and remembered how kind and gentle the nurses were, how they made her feel safe and okay. She wanted to do that for someone else too. So after high school, with her best friend’s support, she started looking into Aurora Bay's medical program.
It was when she was barely twenty-one and just about to begin med school, that her life changed forever.
Her parents didn’t like that she was still best friends with the same boy for so long and even though it had always been just platonic, they feared the day it'd be more. Especially as she got older and just continued to defy them. He wasn’t right for her (translation: he wasn’t rich enough, his family not well-known enough) so they took matters into their own hands and, feeling rather desperate to make sure their daughter would be taken care of and finally reined in, they arranged a marriage between Priya and the son of one of their friends, Andrew Khan. Andrew was a couple years older, came from old money, and was practically groomed from birth to take over his family’s building development business. All in all, he was perfect. And all in all...Priya didn't really feel like she had a choice.
She'd never worked a day in her life, had no money of her own. She could've left of course, but..where would she have even gone? And how? Her father threatened to cut her off. So..reluctantly, she accepted.
The first year or so of their marriage, admittedly, wasn’t so bad. They moved across the country and bought a huge house off the coast of Maine, one with far too many bedrooms and nearly a seven hour flight back home, making it so they rarely even made it back save for holidays and special occasions. It wasn’t even til they were over three years in that Priya realized how…lost she was. She’d taken online classes along with actual ones at a university 45 minutes away, managing to transfer over most of her credits, but Andrew kept saying it was too far, taking up too much of her time. She was always so exhausted after all. And what started as slowly convincing her to cut back hours eventually turned into her dropping out completely. It’d be for the best, he told her. It'd give them more time to just be together. And she naively believed him, Priya slowly changing from the outspoken, rambunctious girl she was to someone more subdued. Broken-in. The picture-perfect wife.
And for years after that, she just continued to believe him, going on thinking that it was for the best. But eventually, she felt stuck. Dull.
She’d learned to be okay around Andrew, sure, but she was never in love with him, not even close. Fondness was about as close to it as she got. He spent so much time dedicated to his job that most nights she slept in their too-large bed by herself. He’d bail on dates, be so late for dinner that she’d eat alone. Priya was lonely. The thing was though…it didn’t seem like Andrew shared the same sentiments.
What used to be him being busy with work had turned into..more. His excuses were becoming flimsy, he became more and more protective with his texts, secretive of his phone calls. He accused her of not trusting him, of not having faith in their relationship. Any time things were brought up, the conversations got so twisted that she oftentimes ended up apologizing. And unfortunately for her, it took far too long for her to realize she wasn’t just being paranoid and that it wasn’t just all in her head.
Instead, it took surprising Andrew with lunch at work one July day and walking in on him with another woman (his secretary, how cliché), for her to realize she was being lied to and strung along for years. Her marriage nothing more than to save face and to be a continuous (secret) business transaction between her father and her in-laws.
She filed to dissolve the marriage the next day, and it was only with the threat that she’d out everything about her father and his that he went along with it uncontested.
Newly-divorced and feeling more alone (but more free) than ever, Priya is back home now in Aurora Bay, feeling that it’s where she should be, even if she's not the same girl who left almost eight years ago. With the money won in the divorce Priya bought herself a much more smaller home inland in town and is finally settling in in ways she was never allowed to both as a teenager and as a wife. She never became a full-fledged nurse either, but she does have some training and wants to maybe go back one day. She just needs to pluck up the courage first- so until then, she's taken up a simple job as a waitress, looking forward to some consistency in new life.
extras:
full name: priya anjali desai
birthday: may 19, 1995
height: 5'8
family: vivek desai (father), anjali desai (mother) meena desai (little sister), andrew kahn (ex-husband), caleb majhi ( @caleb-majhi cousin)
born and raise in aurora bay
married and moved to maine in early 2016
got divorced in july and moved back to aurora bay august 2023
@aurorabayaesthetic
