The Phone Is Ringing. But Nobody Plugged It In — The Velvet Hotline by Arsh Verma, Read & Reviewed by Sameer Gudhate

I have always found something slightly unsettling about telephone calls.

Maybe it is because you cannot see the person on the other end.

You hear a voice, but you don't know what the face behind it looks like. You cannot tell whether someone is speaking calmly because they are genuinely calm, or because they are trying very hard not to fall apart.

Sometimes there is a pause.

Sometimes there is silence.

And sometimes, you realise that the person on the other end may have called because they simply don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

That is where The Velvet Hotline got me.

The premise initially feels almost comforting.

Ayingbi Mayengbam is a primary school teacher looking for some meaningful work during her summer break. She volunteers at a suicide prevention hotline because she wants to help people.

It sounds like the kind of thing a good person would do.

Until her very first day ends with her finding a dead body.

That is probably enough to make most of us reconsider our summer plans.

Ayingbi does.

But then she meets Dr Rastogi.

He is charming, convincing and apparently driven by a more altruistic approach to helping people.

And somehow, Ayingbi finds herself saying yes again.

That is when the book begins to change shape.

What initially looks like a story about a young teacher trying to help troubled strangers slowly becomes something much darker.

And the interesting thing is that Arsh Verma doesn't rush to frighten us.

He lets the uneasiness build.

A conversation doesn't quite feel right.

A caller says something that stays in your head.

Ayingbi notices something she cannot explain.

Then there are the three phones in her cubicle.

Three ordinary phones.

Except one of them isn't plugged in.

And it rings.

I liked that.

Not because it is a particularly loud or spectacular scare, but because by the time that phone rings, Verma has already made the ordinary feel slightly dangerous.

That, for me, is where the novel finds its voice.

The telephone is no longer just a telephone.

It becomes a connection to somebody else's loneliness.

Somebody else's grief.

Somebody else's desperation.

And eventually, perhaps, to something that shouldn't be calling at all.

I read a fair number of psychological thrillers, and I have developed a habit of trying to see behind the curtain.

I start looking for the twist.

I wonder which character is hiding something.

I try to work out where the author is taking me.

With The Velvet Hotline, I found myself doing something slightly different.

I was watching the people.

That became more interesting than trying to solve the mystery.

Because beneath the supernatural elements and the suspense, Verma is dealing with a very human problem.

You cannot save everyone.

We know that intellectually.

But I don't think most of us really understand what that means until we imagine ourselves sitting in Ayingbi's chair, listening to a stranger who may be calling at the worst moment of their life.

Ayingbi starts with something many well-meaning people probably believe:

If you genuinely care, you should be able to help.

It is an understandable belief.

It is also an incredibly difficult one to live with.

Because caring doesn't guarantee an outcome.

You can listen carefully.

You can say the right thing.

You can stay on the phone.

You can try your absolute best.

And still lose someone.

That idea stayed with me much longer than some of the mystery did.

We like to believe that compassion has power.

It does.

But compassion is not control.

And perhaps that distinction is one of the hardest things for a person who spends their time helping others to accept.

I thought Ayingbi worked particularly well because she doesn't suddenly become a perfect expert just because she is now part of the story.

She is inexperienced.

She is sometimes unsure.

She learns.

She makes decisions.

And she keeps going, partly because she genuinely cares and partly because she is stubborn enough not to let go when something doesn't make sense.

Her warmth is her strength.

It is also what puts her in situations she probably should walk away from.

That felt human to me.

The callers are important for the same reason.

Their struggles don't always arrive with a dramatic announcement.

People rarely walk into our lives carrying a sign saying, I am not okay.

Sometimes they sound completely ordinary.

Sometimes they joke.

Sometimes they talk about something else entirely.

Sometimes what they really need is simply somebody who will listen without immediately trying to fix them.

That is one of the strengths of the hotline setting. It gives Verma a way of exploring loneliness without turning every character into a speech about mental health.

And then the supernatural element enters.

This is where readers may differ.

Some will enjoy the strange, eerie turn the story takes. Others may find that aspect less satisfying than the psychological and emotional material surrounding it.

I was somewhere in between.

I found the emotional realism more compelling than the supernatural mystery, but I thought the unexplained elements added an effective layer of uncertainty.

You keep wondering what is actually happening.

Is there a rational explanation?

Is somebody manipulating events?

Is Ayingbi seeing something that others cannot?

And, eventually, you have to entertain a more uncomfortable possibility:

Maybe not everything that frightens us is going to give us an explanation we can comfortably accept.

I will admit that the middle of the book felt a little slow to me.

There were stretches where I wanted the story to move forward faster.

But looking back, I am not entirely sure I would have wanted Verma to rush it.

Ayingbi is learning how to listen.

The reader is, too.

The story needs those conversations and those quieter moments to make the later unease work.

Without that emotional groundwork, the mystery would simply be a mystery.

With it, the phone calls begin to carry a little more weight.

By the time I finished The Velvet Hotline, I wasn't thinking primarily about the supernatural twist.

I was thinking about responsibility.

How much responsibility can one person reasonably carry for another person's life?

We praise the people who stay.

We admire the people who step in when someone is struggling.

We tell people to reach out, to listen, to be there.

All of that matters.

But what happens to the person who is always expected to be the one who saves?

What happens when they realise that being compassionate does not mean being capable of controlling the ending?

I don't think this book gives us a neat answer.

And I'm glad it doesn't.

Because there are some questions that become smaller when a story resolves them too cleanly.

The Velvet Hotline begins with a schoolteacher looking for a meaningful way to spend her summer.

It ends somewhere much darker.

But somewhere along the way, it also becomes a story about something I suspect most of us understand more personally than we would like to admit:

the desperate human need to be heard.

That is what I kept thinking about after I closed the book.

Not the unplugged phone.

Not even the mystery.

The voice.

The person behind it.

And the possibility that somewhere in our own lives, there may have been a person who didn't need us to solve anything.

They just needed us to stay on the line.

Arsh Verma has taken an unusual setting and built a thriller around it without losing sight of the people inside it. The book may not move at exactly the same pace throughout, and the supernatural direction won't work equally well for every reader.

But if you enjoy psychological thrillers that take their time, care about character as much as mystery, and leave you with something to think about after the final page, The Velvet Hotline is worth picking up.

Just don't be surprised if, after finishing it, you look at a ringing telephone a little differently.

#TheVelvetHotline #ArshVerma #BookReview #drsameergudhate #SameerGudhate #BookReviewer #PsychologicalThriller #ThrillerBooks #MysteryThriller #SupernaturalThriller #IndianFiction #IndianAuthors #BookstagramIndia #MentalHealth #HumanBehaviour #LiteraryReview #BookRecommendations #ReadersOfInstagram #BooksOfIndia #WhatToRead