In Always Be My Bibi by Priyanka Taslim, Bibi Hossain is a spirited, wealthy, privileged princess who is not afraid to speak her mind and often gets in trouble for it. This “boy crazy” teen simply wants to date and experience her share of first kisses. Abbu vehemently disagrees and has forbidden Bibi from dating until her older sister, Halima, gets married. Yet stars miraculously align for Bibi when Halima announces that she is getting married to Sunny Rahman. The family travels to Bangladesh for the wedding, then to the tea estate in Sylhet, where the Rahmans, Sunny’s uber-rich family, live.
However, the Rahmans are a snobbish, class-conscious family who look down on the nouveau riche Hossains and openly express their disapproval of Sunny’s choice of wife. Bibi believes their younger son, Sohel, is insufferable and clashes with him when her father tasks her with work at the estate, as part of her summer punishment for sneaking into a senior prom.
Nonetheless, Bibi and Sohel team up for “Operation Breakup,” convinced that Halima and Sunny are not a good match. Bibi starts to develop feelings for the handsome Sohel even as she goes on multiple dates with young men approved and listed in her grandmother’s The Great Big Book of Biodatas.
The reader will have to wait until the end of the book to discover whether Bibi and Sohel succeed in breaking up Halima and Sunny, and what happens to their own budding romance.
Priyanka Taslim draws inspiration from her life growing up in New Jersey, surrounded by her siblings, cousins, and aunties, as well as the broader Bangladeshi diasporic community. She writes with deep affection for her ancestors’ homeland, about the history and cultural heritage of Bangladesh. She provides the reader with a brief history lesson on the country’s tea estates and its colonial past. Tea was introduced to the hilly regions of Sylhet-Assam by the British East India Company — in what was then undivided India before 1947. As Sohel tells Bibi, “[they] stole this land from my great-great-great-grandfather, a zamindar in the seventeenth century. … Before that, my ancestors were using the land for rice paddies.”
As Bibi travels around the villages surrounding the Rahman estate, she discovers the country’s deep-rooted traditions and the beauty of its villages. She is also compelled to confront the wealth and class inequities intertwined with the fabric of this society, which contrasts starkly with her privileged upbringing in the U.S. Taslim is mindful of her young-adult audience, exercising admirable restraint in the romantic scenes between Bibi and Sohel. She skillfully incorporates humor and teasing exchanges between Bibi, Sohel, and the other characters, reflecting typical teenage behavior.
But Bibi’s complete transformation from being an entitled “daddy’s little princess” after just one summer in Bangladesh feels a bit far-fetched. The recurring theme of the aunties’ antagonism toward Halima and the Hossains, along with the introduction of certain secondary characters and parallel storylines, slows the novel’s pace. Taslim could have considered editing this out for a more cohesive narrative.
