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Located at Lainchaur (right opposite the British Embassy), Curilo is one restaurant that was repeatedly recommended to APEX food sleuths. Owners and managers of popular restaurants sang its praise and suggested we try it because the food there is—unique, organic and hygienic. Curilo’s self-explaining menu offers breakfast, lunch, dinners and in-between snacks, all created carefully by its 5-star experienced chef. Focusing more on quality than quantity, the dishes Curilo’s kitchen belt out are freshly made, with a touch of organic and exotic garnish. Curilo makes its own pastas, bagels, buns and multi-grain breads and also serves an exclusive array of desserts.

Probably the only place in Kathmandu where one can try the “Involtini of mango chicken and pancetta, sage butter, soft polenta,” Curilo is popular among local foodies and expats alike. As one of its regular patrons told us at the restaurant, this is a place where many celebrities and socialites “meet, eat and date.”

 THE MENU

Chef’s Special:

- Quinoa and Goat Cheese Salad

- Lamb ravioli, oyster mushroom cream, truffle essence

- Crème Brulee

Opening hours:

- 8:30 am to 10 pm

Location:

   - Lainchaur, Ktm

Cards:

- Accepted

Meal for 2:

- Rs 2,000

Reservations:

    - 014005079

It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say ‘Lullaby’ by Leila Slimani, a French-Moroccan journalist and novelist, is basically a murder story. The book cover gives that away and you will also find out on the very first page that the nanny kills the children. But what you will really be waiting for is the motive behind the murders and Slimani slowly builds the tension in the story while giving you a clue here and there. It all makes for a riveting read, one that will leave you with a chill in your bones.

The set-up is simple and straight­forward: Paul, a music producer, and Myriam, a lawyer, with two young children, look for a nanny so that Myriam can take up a job that her friend has offered her at his law firm. This is how Louise enters their life. With her prim Peter Pan collar, meticulously painted nails, an age­less face, and an apparent way with children, she is just the nanny they had in mind.

Actually, she is even better than what they had in mind. Louise is not only great with their two kids but keeps the house clean and even cooks dinner. It’s like Mary Poppins has come into their lives and solved all their problems. Lou­ise, thus, becomes indispensible for the family, so much so that Paul and Myriam even take her along during a family vacation.

But things quickly unravel and how! Louise’s façade starts crum­bling as she tells the children cruel tales, takes a simple game of hide-and-seek so seriously that the chil­dren get scared, and starts making herself at home at her employer’s house, sometimes even insisting she sleep over in the children’s bed­room. Paul and Myriam start feel­ing unsettled by her ways and, as a reader, you get spooked too. But the slow unspooling of Louise’s own family life—there’s a daughter who deserts her—makes you sympathize with her despite the horrifying act you know she is guilty of.

Lullaby will feel familiar and you will get a sense of déjà vu because the issues it deals with—class, race, gender and above all parenting—are ones we see, hear of, deal with, and read about ever so often. But what works for Lullaby is how bril­liantly Slimani has crafted the story. If at one point you are seeing things entirely from Louise’s perspectives, the very next page will have you firmly on the parents’ side.

Also, a translated work can be a so-so experience but Sam Taylor’s translation is so graceful and con­trolled that it gives nothing away of all the deranged unraveling to come even a second before it’s due. You will read Lullaby with a mounting sense of dread and, at just a little over 200 pages long, you will wish it were longer.

Apart from two or three gen­uinely scary heart-in-your-mouth moments, the ‘The Conjuring’ spin-off ‘The Nun’ is low on plot and even lower on atmo­sphere and tension. This is a period horror replete with gothic imagery and Catholic mysticism. But the gothic aesthetics is sparsely effec­tive and mostly bland while the uncooked screenplay from Gary Dauberman (the noted writer of ‘It’ and ‘Annabelle: Creation’) is full of subpar ideas that try to fill the entire run-time with information dumping instead of invoking any emotional hook points. The attempt is to tell an origin story of the demonic nun who has made several appearances across ‘The Conjuring’ movie universe. This film traces her roots back to 1952, to a remote Christian monas­tery in Romania. As the film opens, two nuns pass through the monas­tery’s dark hallway and stop right outside a sinister looking door. Seconds later an unseen creature attacks both of them.

The news of their death travels to the Vatican where a board of high ranking clergymen decides to send Father Burke (Demian Bichir) to investigate the spooky activities in the monastery. Father Burke is advised to recruit young Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), who’s training to be a nun and has some strange psy­chic abilities. Together they reach the haunted monastery with the sole intent of knowing about the evil spirit lurking inside the place and casting her out.

The problem with ‘The Nun’ is that director Corin Hardy resorts to old-school horror trickery of jump scares and loud background scores. He and his writer make the cardinal sin in horror: revealing too much. The monster that haunts this pic­ture makes repetitive appearances and overexploitation of her pres­ence slowly wanes her impact from being terrorizing to tedious. There’s a sense of haste and incompleteness as the story moves forward in ran­dom directions.

Bichir and Farmiga, the two leads of the film, show no integ­rity to their loosely defined char­acters. Their outside snooping to unravel the mystery feels mechan­ical and fails to make us care about their ghost hunting. Despite this, there’s one well executed sequence involving a priest trapped inside a coffin, which hints of what the movie could’ve been if the makers were open to inventive horror tricks.

When ‘The Conjuring’ first came out, it paved the way for medium-budget horror films with high sense of scare and thrills. Its religious narrative and period setting were refreshing for hor­ror audiences who were getting tired of special effects horror. In a short time it established itself as a brand, resulting in byproducts like ‘The Nun’ that tarnishes the image of the original by committing the mistakes the original one so care­fully sidestepped.

Some movies are so forgettable, you have zero memory of them. ‘The Nun’ falls in the same cate­gory. It’s a quick cash grab from the studio that’s feeding off the loyalty of fans of the original film by giving them a second-rate entertainer. This contributes nothing substantial to the overall universe of ‘The Con­juring’. The only thing left to do is wait for James Wan (the creator and director of the original) to rejuve­nate the series.

 It might not be a book you would be comfortable carrying around because of the quite blatant title, but ‘Erotic Stories for Punjabi Wid­ows’ is an important work that you will want to recommend to every­one you meet.

The novel is audacious in its effort to defy conventions and give voice to older Punjabi women since their voices are rarely, if ever, heard. Also, there are multiple storylines with elements of rom-com, mys­tery, and family saga interwoven into the mix of erotic stories and all that make for good reading for people with different types of book preferences.

Here, the protagonist Nikki is a sin­gle 22-year-old university dropout who lives in London above the pub where she works while she searches for her true calling. Then she kind of finds what she is looking for when she lands up a job as a creative writ­ing instructor at the Sikh temple in Southall, a predominantly Punjabi area of London. Unfortunately, the creative writing class turns out to be an adult literacy class instead and the students—Punjabi widows—don’t even know how to read and write basic English.

Then the women decide that since they have lived in London for so long without speaking a word of English, they would much rather use the class for something construc­tive and begin sharing their stories instead. These stories stem from their dreams and fantasies and are deliciously romantic, erotic, and sometimes even downright scan­dalous, given the community they belong to.

The women know that if the self-appointed ‘guardians’ of South­all find out their secret they will have to face unspeakable wrath but they don’t care. Having been denied the simple pleasures that come with making their own decisions as their lives have always been about what their parents or husbands deemed fit for them, the class is the only place where each woman becomes an individual in her own right and is able to truly express herself. It’s also the thrill of the absence of shame they have carried with them for so long that keeps them going.

Then there is the parallel narrative that’s about Nikki, her relationship with her traditional family as she struggles to fit in as well as escape their ways, and her romance with a boy named Jason who has his own thing going on. You will find yourself cheering for Nikki as well while you pump your fists for the women who seem to be breaking barriers and rewriting their desti­nies. This sexy and heartwarming novel will definitely find a recep­tive audience among women who will want the men in their lives to read it too.