They were, until recently, among the most visible women in Indian corporate and political circles — accompanying their husbands to Davos, attending charity galas in Delhi, appearing in the society pages of magazines that covered a world of power and money that most Indians observed only from a distance.

Now their husbands are in Tihar Jail, awaiting trial in the 2G spectrum scam, and these women are navigating a situation for which no preparation was possible.

The 2G scam, which involved the alleged corrupt allocation of telecom spectrum licenses and is estimated to have cost the Indian government over a trillion rupees in lost revenue, implicated a roster of senior executives, telecom company owners, and political figures. When arrests came, they came at the top — the visible heads of organizations that had been operating at the intersection of corporate India and political patronage for years.

For the wives — and in this cohort, they are almost exclusively wives — the transition has been vertiginous. Legal fees consume resources that were once spent on travel and entertainment. Children's school situations must be navigated with discretion. Social invitations, once plentiful, have become selective in ways that track precisely the new social mathematics of proximity to scandal.

Some have emerged as the functional heads of family business interests, discovering competencies in legal and financial management that their previous lives had not required. Others have retreated entirely from public life. A few have been vocal in their husbands' defense, arguing that the charges are politically motivated — a position that, whatever its legal merit, reflects a genuine belief that the rules of the game they were playing were understood and shared by everyone involved.