'Now the target of the books is lower middle class people, as there is access to porn online,' says Jaiswal. The movie is a fictional biography,' says the debutant director, who found out that a number of Hindi authors used Mastram as a pseudonym to write erotica at that time. I rediscovered his writing but I don't know who he is. 'I had forgotten about Mastram and it was only when I visited Dhanbad and surrounding areas to write the script of GoW that I saw these books being sold at railway stations for Rs 10. Years later, his curiosity has resulted in a 99-minute-long film titled Mastram, which is set to release later this year. 'As a 13-year-old, I used to wonder who Mastram really was and what he would have told his family about his profession,' says Jaiswal, who also penned the Gangs of Wasseypur (GoW) script. Hidden away from the glare of teachers and parents, the books - Yauvan Ki Barish, Jijaji Ka Pyar and other such titles - would be surreptitiously exchanged among friends at a secret hiding place. These were scandalous tales of tabooed relationships spun by an author called Mastram. The film that had a lot of potential, but what’s missing is the ‘woh wali baat’.While growing up in Bhopal in the late '80s, Akhilesh Jaiswal, like most teenagers, was introduced to the sleazy world of soft porn. Rahul’s performance warms up at the start, but his expressions soon get repetitive, and Tara can’t juice the plot that runs dry. The story lacks stamina, and the background music drags the plot.

The problem is the storytelling that’s languid and uninventive for a subject so explorative. It’s about the psyche and dilemma of a writer torn apart between art and erotica. Even the typography of the title symbolizes a male organ, but the film is far from pornographic. Jaiswal’s premise is different and daring he bares the hypocrisies of a society that shames, silences and devours sex – all in the same breath (ahh!).

But what happens when the covers are pulled off his identity and he’s exposed as the man who sells sexual fantasies for a living? His lurid stories (‘Baniye Ka Lollipop’, ‘Sheela Ka Yowan’) discreetly called ‘woh-wali kitaab’ becomes a best-seller. Realizing that sex sells like hot samosas and lust ‘whets’ hungry minds over literature, the struggling Premchand in him begins churning out porn-packed in-paperbacks, under the pseudonym of ‘Mastram’. He finds support only in his sanskari wife (Tara), and even after desperate attempts, all publishers reject his literary work because his kahanis have the matter but lack the ‘meat’. Rajaram (Rahul), a M.A in Hindi, quits his bank job in Manali to pursue his dream of being a novelist.

Mastram story images