I suspect the 40 days part was from the delerium

western Maharashtra state

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

MUMBAI: At 1,408mm, July rainfall was 48% in excess of the month’s average quota of 855mm, thanks to the prolonged wet spell in the city.

That’s over 4.6 feet of rain, and that’s in less than the first three weeks of the month:

And with over a week left for the month to end…

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

In 1944, two scientists deprived themselves of water – one for three days and one for four days – but ate a dry diet of food. By the final day of their experiment, the pair had difficulties swallowing, their faces had become “somewhat pinched and pale”, but they stopped the experiment long before their condition deteriorated to the point where it became dangerous.

The ability to go without water can also vary greatly between individuals. There is some evidence, for example, that the human body can adapt to the level of water a person regularly consumes.

The longest someone is known to have gone without water was in the case of Andreas Mihavecz, an 18-year-old Austrian bricklayer who was left locked in a police cell for 18 days in 1979 after the officers on duty forgot about him. His case even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted, seeing some credibility info about the authors of an article is extremely helpful, especially when it’s a foreign publication I don’t know much about, like CBS News.

Thanks! :-)