What happens when a family that has stopped truly talking to one another is placed inside a car for fifteen days and sent across Spain?
That is the question at the heart of Yusuf Poonawala’s The Spanish Table, a work of fiction that begins as a road-trip novel but gradually reveals itself as something much more intimate: a story about family, identity, ambition, honesty, belonging, and the difficult process of finding your way back to people you never really stopped loving.
For Poonawala, the story brings together two worlds he knows intimately: travel and the complicated dynamics of human relationships.
After spending 24 years at Cox & Kings, one of the world’s oldest travel companies, Poonawala saw his professional world disappear when the company shut its doors in 2019. Months later, the COVID-19 pandemic brought global travel to an almost complete standstill.
That period forced him to confront a question he now often asks entrepreneurs he coaches: “What can only I do?”
The answer led to a second chapter of his life involving entrepreneurship, coaching, founding Lux Voyages, speaking on TEDx stages, and writing his Balanced Leader books.
But The Spanish Table emerged from somewhere different.
It is his first work of fiction—and, by his own description, his most personal book.
A Family That Loves Each Other but Barely Knows Each Other
At the centre of the novel is the Shroff-Agarwal family from Mumbai: Azam, Miana, Karan, and Samaira.
They are not a dysfunctional family in the conventional sense. There is no absence of love. Instead, there is something perhaps more recognizable: emotional distance built slowly through years of routine, expectations, silence, and things left unsaid.
Poonawala built each character around something they cannot say aloud.
Azam is the provider. He expresses love through arrangements, planning, and responsibility. He plans the family’s 15-day itinerary down to the fuel stops, because a perfect plan is easier for him to offer than a simple sentence such as “I’m proud of you.”
Miana is the family’s translator and peacemaker. She smooths conflicts, keeps things moving, and makes sure everyone else is taken care of. But somewhere along the way, she has stopped asking herself what she wants.
Karan is an observer. He carries a notebook and dreams of becoming a writer, but there is irony in his character: he is comfortable writing about life but less comfortable actually risking himself within it.
Samaira is the loudest member of the family. She fills the car with noise and energy and dreams of singing, yet she has never sung in front of a stranger.
Together, they represent something deeply familiar: four people who love one another completely but have somehow stopped truly knowing one another.
The road trip changes that.
For fifteen days, they cannot simply leave the room—or, more accurately, the car.
The Dreams Indian Families Don’t Always Know How to Handle
Karan wants to write.
Samaira wants to sing.
Neither ambition fits neatly into the traditional idea of professional security.
Poonawala deliberately chose two careers that can make Indian parents nervous because they are difficult to quantify on a visiting card.
But The Spanish Table does not turn Azam and Miana into stereotypical controlling parents. Their resistance comes from a more complicated place.
Fear.
“Fear in an Indian home is usually love wearing a seatbelt,” Poonawala explains.
His characters are not fighting over whether their children should dream. They are confronting a more difficult question: how much uncertainty can parents tolerate when their children’s happiness requires taking a path they cannot guarantee?
The novel ultimately argues that children do not necessarily need their parents to eliminate risk. They need their parents to trust them enough to take it.
The story is therefore not about children defeating their parents.
It is about parents learning that the safest place for a child is not always the most secure path—but the place where that child can become fully themselves.
When Family Conversation Becomes Logistics
One of the novel’s most recognizable ideas is the way family communication can gradually become purely functional.
Have you eaten?
Did you pay the bill?
What time is your class?
What time are you leaving?
When will you be back?
These questions keep a household functioning, but they do not necessarily create intimacy.
Poonawala calls this “efficiency”—the point at which family conversation becomes about logistics rather than the soul.
Phones at dinner tables, fear of disappointing one another, and the familiar Indian tendency to “adjust” rather than openly confront difficult emotions can make the distance even greater.
As Poonawala puts it, most families do not necessarily fall apart.
They drift apart, one unasked question at a time.
That idea becomes one of the novel’s emotional foundations.
Spain Is More Than a Setting
One of the most distinctive creative choices in The Spanish Table is that Spain itself becomes a character.
The country narrates certain chapters in the first person, observing the Shroff-Agarwal family as they move through its landscapes, cities, villages, meals, and traditions.
Poonawala deliberately avoided treating Spain as postcard scenery.
Instead, he imagined the country as an old, warm, slightly amused host—someone who has seen Romans, Moors, pilgrims, and millions of tourists pass through its history and is therefore not easily surprised.
The decision fundamentally changed his own relationship with the country.
For three decades, Poonawala had experienced Spain professionally, thinking in terms of itineraries, hotels, experiences, and journeys.
Writing the novel required him to listen to Spain rather than simply introduce it to travellers.
“I had spent three decades introducing people to Spain,” he reflects. “Writing this book, Spain finally introduced itself to me.”
The result is a travel narrative in which the destination is not merely something the characters see. It actively participates in what they become.
When the Map Becomes the Plot
The family’s 15-day journey is carefully constructed so that their physical movement across Spain mirrors their emotional transformation.
As Poonawala puts it, “the map is the plot.”
The journey begins in Madrid, where the size and energy of the city allow the family to remain busy and distracted. Even their first shared tapas experience quietly begins to crack Miana’s composure.
Then the GPS fails them in Navarra.
A wrong turn takes them to an unmapped village, where an elderly couple invites them to their kitchen table and feeds them.
For the first time, the family eats without performing.
From there, the journey takes them through Olite’s castle and the vineyards of Haro in La Rioja, where the patience of vines becomes an unexpected lesson for Karan and his writing.
The mountains of Cazorla in Andalucía give Samaira something she did not expect: a waterfall and an audience she never asked for.
Barcelona becomes the place where the family’s cracks become increasingly visible.
Then comes the silence of Extremadura, the vultures of Monfragüe, and the dehesa forests—landscapes that create the emotional space for a conversation that years in Mumbai could not produce.
Finally, the road returns to Barcelona.
Day 12 is waiting.
Poonawala intentionally chose lesser-known destinations rather than relying entirely on familiar tourist landmarks.
The reason is simple: familiar landmarks would allow the family to behave like tourists.
Unfamiliar places would force them to behave like themselves.
Day 12: When the Polite Fiction Ends
Every journey has a honeymoon period.
Poonawala learned that through decades of travel experience.
During the first part of a group tour, everyone is generally on their best behaviour. The photographs look wonderful. People remain polite. The masks stay in place.
But by Day 10 or 11, exhaustion begins to strip away the performance.
People start saying what they really mean.
That understanding became the structural logic behind Day 12.
Poonawala deliberately avoided making the family’s emotional collapse happen too early because it would have felt artificial. But waiting too long would not have left enough space for what happens afterward.
The truth had to emerge at exactly the point when the family had earned it.
And the novel gives them three days after the collapse.
Because, ultimately, Poonawala is less interested in the moment a family breaks than in what it chooses to do afterward.
Food as a Language of Reconciliation
At the centre of The Spanish Table is, naturally, a table.
Food becomes one of the novel’s most important metaphors because it requires no translation.
Two people can sit across from each other without completely understanding one another’s language, faith, history, or wounds—and still share a meal.
That idea reaches its most powerful expression in the novel’s final image: dal and patatas bravas occupying the same table.
The symbolism is deliberately simple.
The dal does not become less Indian because Spanish food sits beside it.
Neither does the Spanish dish need to disappear for the Indian one to belong.
For Poonawala, that is what reconciliation should look like.
Not one side surrendering to the other.
Not one identity replacing another.
Two different histories agreeing to occupy the same space without either one disappearing.
It is also an idea that speaks to a generation of Indians increasingly negotiating between cultural roots and global identities.
Young Indians, Poonawala suggests, should not have to choose between their roots and their wings.
A person can carry Mumbai and Madrid in the same heart.
Miana: The Character Who Changed the Book
Interestingly, the character who became most important to Poonawala was not initially intended to occupy the emotional centre of the novel.
That character was Miana.
At first, she was simply the calm mother who kept everything running—the person who translated conflicts and maintained the family’s equilibrium.
But during the second draft, Poonawala realised that he had unintentionally written her in the way families often perceive mothers: through what they do for everyone else rather than who they are themselves.
That realization forced him to ask a question nobody in Miana’s family had asked for twenty years:
What does Miana want?
Her answer changed the book.
She became, quietly, its heart.
It is therefore fitting that the final scene takes place at her table.
When the Author Had to Stop Solving the Story
Poonawala’s transition from non-fiction to fiction brought another major challenge.
As a leadership writer and coach, he is accustomed to giving people frameworks, explanations, and solutions.
Fiction does not always allow that.
One example involved Karan, who receives validation at precisely the moment he needs it. Poonawala initially wanted to let the character accept it immediately.
Instead, he removed the resolution.
Karan had to remain uncomfortable.
That experience forced Poonawala to confront one of his own instincts: the desire to rescue the reader.
Fiction demanded that he trust his characters—and his audience.
That lesson becomes particularly important in Azam and Miana’s marriage.
When their truth finally surfaces in Barcelona, the author’s coaching instincts wanted to repair everything: a long conversation, a clear plan, a promise that everything would be fine.
But Azam does not solve the problem.
He simply says, “I am not in a position to judge you. I am in a position to stay.”
Even after the family returns to Mumbai, the novel refuses to declare them completely healed.
Miana acknowledges that their 23 years together were real but incomplete.
Azam answers with two words:
“I’m here.”
For Poonawala, leaving them unfinished was difficult—but it was also more truthful.
Families do not necessarily get “fixed.”
They get honest.
And honesty is not the ending.
It is the beginning.
Travel as a Vehicle for Reinvention
It would be easy to describe The Spanish Table simply as a travel novel.
But Poonawala sees travel as the vehicle rather than the destination.
“Travel is the vehicle. Reinvention is the destination.”
That idea is rooted deeply in his own experience.
After 24 years at Cox & Kings, the company shut its doors in 2019. The professional identity Poonawala had built around travel suddenly disappeared. The pandemic then fundamentally altered the industry itself.
The experience forced him to confront what comes after the thing you built your life around disappears.
That personal experience finds its way into Azam, whose identity is similarly connected to his professional role and the sense of security it provides.
The novel therefore becomes partly a meditation on reinvention: what happens when an identity, relationship, career, or expectation that once seemed permanent suddenly changes?
And what kind of life can be built afterward?
The Radical Act of Staying at the Table
If readers were to take one idea from Spanish culture and bring it into their own lives, Poonawala has a simple answer:
Sobremesa.
It is the Spanish tradition of lingering at the table after a meal, when the food has already been eaten but the conversation continues.
Poonawala recalls a lunch outside Seville that lasted almost three hours. Nobody had planned to stay that long. The plates were empty, yet nobody moved.
That experience changed the way he thinks about relationships and even leadership.
In his mentoring work, he has noticed that people schedule almost everything except the unscheduled time after a formal meeting—the period when someone might finally say what they actually came to say.
He now deliberately protects that time.
Because sometimes the real work begins after the official meeting is over.
In a culture obsessed with efficiency, lingering becomes a radical act.
It means choosing presence over the next item on the agenda.
The Table Is Waiting
Ultimately, The Spanish Table is about more than Spain.
It is about what travel can reveal when we stop treating it as escape.
It is about parents learning to hear their children’s dreams.
It is about people discovering that their identities are larger than their professional titles.
It is about cultures meeting without one having to disappear.
It is about marriages that need honesty more than easy solutions.
And it is about the people sitting closest to us—the people we think we already know.
Poonawala hopes readers finish the novel and realise that the most unexplored territory in their lives may be sitting across their own dinner table.
People travel thousands of kilometres to see cathedrals and monuments, yet sometimes fail to cross the one metre separating them from their own child.
The answer does not necessarily require a 15-day road trip through Spain.
It might require only one real question.
And the willingness to stay long enough to hear the answer.
That is ultimately what The Spanish Table offers: not an escape from home, but a way back to it.
And perhaps that is why the table matters so much.
Because the table is waiting.
The post The Spanish Table: When a Road Trip Becomes a Journey Back to Each Other appeared first on Borok Times.