It was during a covid lockdown in 2021 that I found the family archive: hundreds of folders holding thousands of letters dating back to the 1940s and 50s, plus dozens of accounting books, stacked neatly in retro aluminium filing cabinets. What my sister and I had spent decades searching for miraculously appeared before us, gathering dust in my late father's diwaniya reception room. To this day, I am unsure as to how it got there. For anyone interested in the micro-histories of pre-oil Kuwait, this was as good as finding gold.

An archive is a complicated beast, and to a novice like me, it was truly daunting - particularly as there were no longer family members of that generation from whom to seek guidance. Hundreds of letters were piled in each folder, all in indecipherable handwritten Arabic. My relationship with the archive evolved over the years; the letters, their content, the style of writing, the addressees, the letterheads, even the smell and the quality of the paper - countless hours were spent figuring out the who, where, what and why. It was a voyage in time, back to an era where even the way fathers and sons addressed each other was different.

In the '70s and '80s, the old generation of Kuwaiti men was still keen to share their stories from their time across the Indian Ocean. In the early '40s, my father - at around the age of 19 - having barely graduated high school in Basra, was shipped off to Calcutta and Mumbai - to take over from his uncle who was running the family business: date merchants, or so we were told. Uncles and cousins were scattered further still - some in Aden, Addis, Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus - a family stretched from the Levant to the Indian Ocean. I remember sitting around the dining table, entertained by my father's Sinbad the Sailor-like stories. He always kept it light.

We had heard - over the years - that Kuwaiti merchant families had been heavily involved in gold smuggling from the Gulf to India. In the interwar period, under the Raj, the British banned the import of gold. Preferring to hold onto their gold reserves back home, they kept tight control over its import, prioritizing the sterling. Merchant families around the Gulf, with a history of trading across the Indian Ocean, saw an opportunity; gold was always in high demand, in particular during a supply squeeze, and as such they stepped in.

What I eventually was able to glean from the letters was the extent to which the family had been involved in the gold smuggling trade to India. The archive unlocked a history that had heretofore been only orally shared - en passant - but never documented. The most interesting finding related to the internal workings - up and downstream - of the smuggling enterprise: the importance of family bonds and networks spread out across countries, the capacity to navigate across jurisdictions, the role of trust across the whole chain of command - from merchants to boat captains, sailors, and bankers.

For her undergraduate thesis, my daughter Yasmine analyzed approximately 100 letters and several accounting books. Although not a historian, her research was "a small contribution to the emerging historiography of the Gulf and a personal step towards recovering a familial narrative." Yasmine triangulated information across sources - the family archive, a court case against my father, oral histories, and colonial archives - detailing the process by which the gold was imported into Basra, where the family had large date palm plantations, and then made its way - through shipments of dates - to India. In documenting the micro-history of the family in the gold smuggling enterprise within a colonial context, her findings are truly groundbreaking.

Every August, when I'm back in Kuwait, I dedicate my afternoons to the archive. Dozens of folders, carefully stored in dark closets, are taken out and diligently scanned. The task of scanning is truly herculean, and at my pace, might last another decade. But it is a labor of love, and the more I familiarize myself with its contents, the more attached I become. This archive is my inheritance; in its form, it is my connection to a past I never knew but always yearned to understand, and in its essence, it has helped me approach life with curiosity, openness, and a spirit of adventure.