A blast from the past! While Mastram is often referred to as a single book, it is actually a pseudonym for a large number of very cheap, erotic pulp novels published in North India in the 80s and 90s. While the plots of the individual books are repeatedly repeated, the basic structure is always that of a young, naive girl from a village, a corrupt landlord/stranger, lots of melodramatic plot and many build-ups to the sex scenes, described in very flowery and coded language to make as much as possible of the restricted nature of the publications. Most Mastram stories follow the basic pattern of a secret, forbidden affair which is swiftly followed by blackmail and then revenge of some kind or another. Much drama, sudden switch of emotion and character, and much over-the-top behavior is the stock-in-trade of this bizarre brand of popular culture. Melodrama and cliché are written into the very fabric of the novels, and the vast majority were read in secret by the author and by his readers, who passed the books from hand to hand in guilty, forbidden pleasure. Not exactly literature, but then again, they managed to carve out a unique and very distinct place in the culture.
While it’s possible to find great books on any platform (free or paid), the platforms themselves matter less than your ability to filter and the information you get from other readers. Learning to use advanced search operators can help you find more of what you need on any platform. For example, AO3 allows you to exclude tags, pair up characters, and set a word count. Google search can also be filtered by using “site:[website URL]” followed by your search terms to only look for information within a single website. Furthermore, word of mouth is valuable. Find a reviewer on Goodreads or a Twitter user who reads in a similar vein to yourself and they can alert you to free books, new authors publishing on free platforms, and even older archives of books that you may have otherwise missed. Essentially, the best sources of information are not necessarily the most obvious, and it is building a network of sources that will provide the most relevant information to you as a reader.
A friend of mine claims that later stories (from the early 2000s onwards) by Mastram tried to incorporate more of a plot and an even darker ending. He’s talking about stories and scenes of betrayal, blackmail and even a few murders. Apparently, Mastram tried to change the tone of his stories to make them more comparable to the typical crime thriller. I haven’t been able to track down and read these stories myself, but it would be interesting to see how they developed. Maybe the ending of a Mastram story changed from simple satisfaction to something darker and more complex. Or perhaps even the ending of a Mastram-style story was meant to change. Maybe the true ending of a Mastram-style story wasn’t a satisfaction at all, but rather the moment when the simple identity of the stories was lost in a attempt to change them into something completely different – in other words, into a different genre of story.