One Bidoon father’s all-consuming and occasionally illegal efforts to assemble the perfect personal library.

When it came to books, my father had absolutely no shame. On his first day at the ten-day Kuwait International Book Fair, he’d pile stacks of books at a publisher’s booth and ask him to keep the books under the table because he feared they’d sell out before his salary hit his bank account. The publishers happily agreed, as they knew he was a serious buyer. But sometimes they fell too easily into his trap. When one of them went to use the bathroom and left his booth unattended, the monster would go into the booth and swiftly grab the bags of books from under the table, before proceeding on his daily tour. When I anxiously protested this scheme, he rehearsed the various scenarios with me: “If someone stops me, I say that it’s my bag, and I left it there because it’s heavy. If the seller himself catches me, I play nice and demand to know where he was: I was trying to find him to pay him his money.” With the kidnapped books in hand, my father would make runs to the parking lot to place them in the car trunk, before returning to search for new victims.

The book purchases, too, weren’t always innocent. Sometimes they acted as covers for hidden thefts. “I’d say I gave them a good deal: paid for five books, and took two extra,” he’d explain to me, a “fair repricing method.” He’d remind me that we did not “steal”; we simply “took” books that we loved, and would read. Sometimes he’d take my cousin Youssef with him, or one of my siblings. I didn’t mind covering for my father; everyone found me adorable, especially when I discussed books with them. Dad would gesture to me to distract the booksellers as he dropped the jewels into his bag. He’d then join in the conversation, waving a book: “Ustaz, how much for this one? What? Three dinars is a lot. Where is my discount?” He’d heckle them, joke with them, engage them in twenty-minute-long conversations. My theft skills were mostly limited to distracting sellers, though sometimes we reversed roles, if we had already negotiated what books we needed from a given publisher.

But at no point was I to become as good a thief as my father, or as my cousin Youssef, who has since made a life out of bookselling. One time, my father and cousin declared that they’d be stealing a ten-volume encyclopedia: Jawad Ali’s Tārīkh al-‘Arab qabla al-Islām (History of the Arabs before Islam). I stood in my place, terrified, too speechless to talk them out of it, too short for their sight line, lost in between them. They discussed the steps quickly, filled with excitement. I protested their plan, saying I couldn’t come along, and they agreed that I should stay behind. My body couldn’t move an inch, but my head was turning left and right, scanning the surrounding area, as if I’d have dared to warn them if someone appeared. My cousin grabbed seven volumes in one fat hug and walked toward the door, aiming for the parking lot, while my father slipped the remaining volumes into his bag. They walked to the end of the aisle as my father chanted gibberish words after my cousin, in hysterical thrill and laughter, then continued on his tour of the fair.

My father’s bookish interests would come to define much of my childhood and adolescence. As a young person, I took his intensity to be that of a passionate reader and collector, but as an adult, I began to connect it to his past. Spurred by my own experience of loss and separation after moving to the US, I started to unpack the many stories he told of his books, those dead and alive.

1.

The local bookstores were a different story. They were a red line for his thefts for reasons he didn’t disclose. It could have been because he was a favorite customer. They took care of him, admired him, always tried to get him the books he needed. They appreciated his thorough scanning of their shelves, how he emerged from the dust with decades-old books that had been recklessly shoved to the back to make space for new ones.

Almost every Friday, we’d get up early, while my siblings were still asleep. My mother made breakfast, and the three of us would enjoy some rare moments of quiet, eating eggs, scrambled with tomatoes and onions, with sides of feta cheese, olives, and pita bread. If one of the little devils got up early, we’d send him to get fresh bread, or chapati. When we finished our breakfast, leaving my mother to clean up after us, my father and I would get into his 1987 gray Chevrolet Caprice, which my siblings and I had named the Titanic, a car always on the verge of breaking down.

On these trips, I’d sometimes have a list of titles written down, books that my father didn’t have that I had come across in my reading. I was in pursuit of “comprehensive knowledge,” as my father taught me to be. “You can never be a good writer if you don’t read all sorts of books. A poet who only reads poetry can’t go far.” He’d then proceed, quoting Gramsci: “A comprehensive knowledge is essential for the organic intellectual,” though I wasn’t sure if Gramsci ever did write such a statement. Something my father was certain to do was to name-drop. In the same sentence, he’d open with one name, link up to another halfway through, then close out with a third. Usually they were Western writers and thinkers; he was a big fan of the Enlightenment. He called them his “universal tribe,” his glasses lingering on the tip of his long nose. I soon came to realize that even when my father had a brilliant idea of his own, he preferred to credit it to one of his favorite great whites.

When the Titanic arrived in Hawally, one of the main urban areas where Arab immigrants are concentrated, we’d go first to al-Orouba bookstore. (In the ’80s, the demographics of Kuwait consisted of a majority of South Asian and Arab migrants, a 40 percent citizen population, and an undisclosed percentage of stateless Arabs, or Bidoon, which included my own family. After the Gulf War, these percentages didn’t shift much, but certain groups, such as Palestinians, Iraqis, and Bidoon, were painted as coconspirators in the occupation and targeted with various forms of forced displacement.) Al-Orouba was a small shop established by a professor of Arabic literature at Kuwait University. We’d get to the bookstore before the owner himself was there for his daily check-up visit, perhaps because he went to Friday prayers and my father never did. Located on a narrow street covered in potholes, where it was always a struggle to find parking, the store had a wide glass front that offered a good view of its interior. Once you entered the L-shaped shop, the checkout counter was on your left and the magazine section on your right. The ceilings were at least ten feet high, every inch leading up to them stacked with books. Beyond the front section, the rest of the shop was organized around two aisles and a storage room at the back. The bookseller, Mr. Adel, was an Egyptian man of my father’s age. He had a white beard and a quiet manner. He was always happy to see us, especially since most people entered the store by mistake. He’d patiently clarify to those lost souls that “it’s a bookstore, as in we sell books, not notebooks,” before directing them to the stationery shop next door. At the time, it was an insult for any bookstore to carry notebooks and pens, a bad look that could scare away serious customers like my father. But in the late 2000s, al-Orouba devoted its entire front section to notebooks and pens, in an attempt at survival.

Before we delved into the shelves for the next hour or two, Mr. Adel would voluntarily provide us with updates on his inventory. I took these updates seriously. He’d point with his index finger, and in his calm voice say, “We just received those titles from Cairo, and over there are the ones from Beirut. Outside, there are a few new issues of the usual periodicals.” Sometimes my father would have a follow-up question about a book he had requested, even though he knew very well how long it took to order and receive one. “End of the month, inshallah,” Mr. Adel would respond.

My father and I had two approaches to book shopping. Sometimes we began in the same section, and while shopping we brought each other’s attention to certain titles, exchanged opinions on whether a book was worth buying, which translation was better, what publishers to avoid because they were too commercial and therefore less rigorous. This was the slow approach. Other times we each began in a different section, and at some point met in the middle. I’d go to my father for feedback, or to impress him with a book I had captured. My father taught me not to leave a single bookshelf unturned, at least the ones within my physical reach. Even the books hidden behind other books must be checked, because on rare occasions, the ones in the back were the special titles, out of circulation, not glossy or new enough to attract customers—but to us, they were treasures. My father loved dead books, though he didn’t necessarily care for first editions or nice covers. He cared for “good translations, good writers.” He was naturally a comparatist, and he owned all Arabic translations of Cervantes, Dante, T. S. Eliot, Whitman, Gabriel García Márquez, and would indulge in long explanations of which translators had failed and which had done a good job, without having read the originals. He was obsessed with translation traitors: His monolingualism was a source of anxiety, and he wanted the translation to be faithful, to be a mirror, because why would anyone dare interfere when translating the greats! After an hour or two at a given bookstore, we’d have completed our search, proud of our picks, tired and dehydrated, our lungs agitated by the dust. We’d conclude the trip with a private meeting in a corner of the shop, as far as possible from the bookseller and his customers, calculating the overall cost, estimating the probability of a discount, and assessing if there were books to leave on hold until our next visit.

Although al-Orouba was not the only bookstore in town, it was our favorite—reliable, focused on literature and philosophy, with a small inventory of regional magazines and periodicals. Some weeks, my father might find himself energetic enough to suggest that we visit other bookstores. We might go to Qurtas, in the old city, which enjoyed a bigger space, modern and brightly lit, with a traditional faux mud facade. The books at Qurtas were more expensive, focused on history and politics. Although I published my debut with Qurtas, the publisher never offered me an author’s discount, perhaps because they were too broke to be generous! There was also al-Rubayan’s disappointing bookstore, which we visited to kill time or to check on its owner, Mr. Yahya al-Rubayan. Once a vibrant place that functioned as a press, a bookstore, and a gathering space (or so I was told by my father), the al-Rubayan’s I knew felt more like a haunted and suffocated place. Mr. Yahya seemed to have given up on his shop, often complaining that people didn’t read books anymore. The inventory didn’t change, as he rarely bothered to acquire new books. As he aged, so did his curatorial taste, which seemed traditional and out-of-touch. My only enjoyable visit to al-Rubayan’s was when Mr. Yahya declared bankruptcy in 2007, opening to the public the store’s massive storage basements, where books were sold for the equivalent of one dollar each. The basement contained many books printed in Iraq prior to the Gulf War, after which they could not be showcased, due to an official ban on anything Iraqi in Kuwait—whether it was a book printed in Iraq, a cassette tape of Iraqi singers, or even a TV show whose closing credits included the name of an Iraqi actress! But following the execution of Saddam Hussein in 2006, the Kuwaiti state relaxed, and Iraqi books and songs were no longer prohibited materials to be exchanged in secret. A fourth bookstore, one we rarely visited, was That al-Salasil, where a Palestinian bookseller once managed to provide us with a copy of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, which was banned for its criticism of the oil state and satirizing of the Arab Gulf’s ruling families. Today, That al-Salasil and al-Rubayan’s continue to operate, but Qurtas and al-Orouba had to close. That al-Salasil switched to a commercial model that relies on selling popular books, while al-Rubayan’s was saved by a special presidential grant after declaring bankruptcy. In 2012, a year after I left Kuwait, I found out that a fire had erupted at al-Orouba, devouring thousands of its dusty books in the span of hours.

Read the rest over at The Believer.