Police in India found a 50-year-old American woman chained to a tree in a forest in the country’s western Maharashtra state, where she claims her Indian husband left her to die. Maharashtra Police told CBS News the woman, identified as Lalita Kayi Kumar, was found in a forest in the Sindhudurg district of the state, about 280 miles south of India’s financial capital Mumbai, on Saturday after local shepherds heard her cries for help and alerted authorities.
Photos and videos broadcast by Indian news outlets showed an emaciated-looking woman clad in ragged, loose clothing being assisted by rescuers in the middle of a forest, with one of her legs affixed to a tree with a metal chain.
I am cautious in believing this story, the general survival rule is that a person can go 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. She claims she went 40 days without food and water which would be significantly longer than any person would normally survive.
I suspect the 40 days part was from the delerium
This is India’s monsoon season.
Looking specifically at the state in question:
https://en.climate-data.org/asia/india/maharashtra-747/
It looks like this is the rainiest month of the year for Maharashtra.
EDIT: Apparently this year was also exceptionally rainy in western Maharashtra:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/mumbai-surpasses-average-july-rainfall-quota-by-nearly-50/articleshow/111937292.cms
That’s over 4.6 feet of rain, and that’s in less than the first three weeks of the month:
EDIT2: That being said, it also says that she has psychiatric problems, but again, if my husband had, in fact, just tried to kill me via exposure, I imagine that I’d also be pretty mentally messed-up, so…shrugs I expect that the police have their work cut out for them.
EDIT3: You’re also being too conservative on food, I think. Most people these days have a lot more fat on them than in the past.
A pound of fat has about 3,500 calories. An adult female needs about 1,600 calories a day to maintain weight, so a bit under half a pound of fat a day. And once the fat is gone, your body can also burn through muscle and such.
I’ve personally fasted for over a week for the hell of it. I was chatting with my aunt a while back and learned that she’d done over two weeks for the hell of it. You don’t casually do something that puts you on the brink of death.
There’s a Scottish guy who fasted for over a year (well, under medical supervision and took vitamin pills), though he was obese going into the thing.
40 days without food is, for a woman, maybe under 20 pounds of fat, and the body can dig into the muscle after that. I’m pretty sure that the typical person – man or woman – in the US could do 40 days without food, no sweat.
We’re used to eating daily, but humans can go for a damn long time without food if they need to do so.
The article also says that the woman here was emaciated coming out of this.
EDIT4: I also think that you’re conservative on water. Water is, for anyone in a reasonably normal condition of health, way more urgent than food, no disagreement there. And you start to get problems from dehydration. I agree that if that if you cut someone off from any source of water for 40 days, they are going to be dead at the end of it – for her to have done 40 days, she’d have to had access to rainfall or condensation or digging a hole for water or something. But I’ve looked in the past, and the rule-of-thumb I’ve read was a week, and there are definitely cases of people who went for over a week without water, like shipwreck survivors. You are going to be seeing a lot of problems, though, at that point – I would very much not try pushing those limits.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201016-why-we-cant-survive-without-water