So you’ve been told that women are lapping up the orgy of cricket unleashed by the Indian Premier League. You’ve heard it said that they are sitting glued to their TV screens, cheering on their teams and punching the air — in short, that they’ve taken to cricket in quicktime with as much glee as a shopping binge paid for by someone else.

Well, may be some of them have — poor deluded souls who can’t see trouble when it stares them in the face. But the rest of us have begun to regard the IPL with a baleful eye. For we’ve caught on that it has thrust a whole new role upon us. We’ve become cricket widows — women who’ll lose their husbands and partners to the game when the IPL season comes around every year.

Mind you, I know women who were quite enthusiastic about Twenty20 cricket at first. They loved the idea that a match would now be over in three hours or thereabouts. What a delightful change from those godawful Test matches and those over-long One-Dayers, they exclaimed. So they sat down to watch a few IPL games, loyally screamed “Come on!” at regular intervals, and shouted “Yes!” each time the ball hit the fence or each time an opponent’s wicket fell. They had a niggling feeling that they were perhaps overdoing things a bit, but, hey, IPL seemed to be one helluva party — it was cricket sexed up, full of big bucks and big movie stars — and they were happy to join in.

But more than a month and innumerable matches later (IPL packs in a staggering 115 games), they’re beginning to realise that nano-cricket in giga doses has its downsides. Chief among which is the fact that while they are tired of this unending avalanche of cricket, their significant others have no time for anything else.

Now every day is cricket day. And every evening is spent religiously watching some Twenty20 game or the other. Try asking the male cricket junkie you live with why he is riveted to a match between the Delhi DareDevils and the Rajasthan Royals when both of you were rooting for the benighted knights of Kolkata. “I won’t watch Glenn McGrath? I won’t watch Shane Warne?” he will reply in shocked amazement and, digging himself deeper into the couch, resume his splendid impersonation of the proverbial potato.

The bitter truth is, he is watching ALL the matches. And the post-match analyses. And the prize distribution ceremonies. And the super-sixes, and the nasty no balls, and the glorious goof-ups. Okay, I made up the last two, but you get the drift.

In short, it’s now abundantly clear that as long as the IPL is on, cricket and television will rule this man’s life. Socialising? Forget it. Conversation? You got to be joking. Catching your favourite programme on Star World? Not a chance — not while he sits there monopolising the TV as though his life depended on it.

Hear it from Srinwanti Basu, an HR professional who works for an IT firm in Calcutta. “It was okay at first,” she says. “I too watched a few matches, especially the ones involving the Kolkata Knight Riders. But now I find that my husband is watching cricket all the time. It’s really getting to be very boring for me.” Basu says that her husband, also an IT employee, doesn’t want to go out anywhere these days and tries to come back home by 7 ’clock so that he can watch the entire match.

Needless to say, with the menfolk having become surgically attached to their TV sets, social life à deux has taken a direct hit. Jhimli Baruah, wife of a tea taster with a leading tea company, says that her husband got out of going to a party recently because he didn’t want to miss a particular game. And when Keya Sen (name changed), a journalist, wanted to invite some people over, her husband told her to cancel it because he had a business meeting to attend. “It turned out later that he got together with some of his buddies and went to a friend’s house to watch a KKR vs Mumbai Indians match,” says Sen, laughing.

At least Sen is still laughing. But Mahtaba Kabir, a 27-year-old newly-wed, is seriously aggrieved by her husband’s single-minded devotion to IPL. “The moment he comes home from work, he’ll switch on the TV and sit before it. He won’t talk, he won’t go out — nothing. I’m really fed up,” she sulks.

And it’s not just the wives. Some say that even children are bearing the brunt of their dads’ cricket fever. For instance, when Baruah wanted her husband to help prepare their six-year-old son for his exam, he refused because he couldn’t tear himself away from a match. “We actually had a fight over it,” she says, forcing a laugh.

It’s enough to make a girl sigh with exasperation and long for those good old days when the husband could catch some live action cricket only on weekends, or when there was the odd day-nighter.

But now that this marathon megafest of cricket will rear its ugly head every year, is it time for us cricket widows to band together? The US football season, which lasts from September to February each year, has bred countless such hapless women. Like them, maybe we too could set up websites and share tips on how to cope with this annual scourge. The more enterprising among us could pen self-help books — How to Live and Let Live When Cricket Epidemic Strikes. Or we could devise our own IPL-inspired entertainment — like, say, take bets on which player Preity Zinta will hug in the next King’s XI Punjab match. Or we could simply buy another TV, move into another room, and get set for some serious idiot box fix of the non-cricketing kind.

And if all else fails, well, we could always look out for a doosra!