A 56-year-old Indian woman? Fighting off an attacking leopard? With a sickle?
(Yes. That’s a tiger. Well done, nitpick Nancy.)
As much as I love animals, I adore a good story about self-defense ass kicking.
I immediately thought of Dorothy cuffing Tinman’s axe and slaying all the lions, tigers, and bears closing in on them like Uma Thurman with the Crazy 88 – culminating in an end-scene, final warrior pose in a pool of blood, an audience of her three stunned friends and dog, and no sound but the adrenalized breath coming in waves through her flared nostrils.
(Right? We all share my very specific Walter Mitty fantasy version here?)
Homegirl (formal name Kamal Devi) was already pretty kick-ass in that she was a widowed mom in her fifties, working hard in the fields to feed what was left of her family. She had no way of knowing that in the middle of carrying some water home, her mundane daily labor-slaving would suddenly morph into a leopard-slaying fight to the death that lasted (for around the same length as an actual Tarantino battle scene) half a fluffing hour. Are you kidding? In this real life Tom and Jerry standoff, she kept hatcheting away at the bastard with her sickle and it kept coming on after her, refusing to surrender its kill, until she finally got enough of an upper hand to take him down.
“I thought I was dead but I did not lose patience and courage,” she told reporters from the hospital bed where she was being treated for multiple bites and fractures.
In the end, this supermom landed herself two fractures on one of her hands, a break in the other, and about one stitch for every year she’s spent alive – but not before smashing the motherclucker’s chompers out and bloodily limping to the next village to seek a bit of help for her eventful morning’s war wounds.
But there’s one comment of information from a villager I feel to be the most relevant in this tale: “It was around 10 in the morning when she went to the field. A leopard pounced on her.”
Morning? Ah, suddenly this showdown becomes far more relatable and believable. Bish was going on that old familiar pre-caffeinated wrath fuel. I give zero fckks if you’re a grizzly bear or a telemarketer – if it’s my-coffee-hasn’t-kicked-in-yet o’clock and I’ve got to go to work and ya come at me, bro… you’re gonna have a bad time. And by bad time, I mean leave this fight minus a few body parts that I’ll later drape around my neck like gory Yurman warning signs just daring anyone else to try the same.
“No, really! I mean it. Gotta replace this one anyway. Starting to smell.”
Still – thirty minutes? On no coffee? I so wouldn’t last.
In the end, I kinda feel the same way about the Indian badass chick as I did with that video of the guy interfering with that real-time NatGeo mantis trying to kill a hummingbird. By excessively porking eachother, we’ve overpopulated and encroached on things like leopard land. That sucks and needs to change ’cause they were there first. But the thing is, most of us didn’t sign up to be born – but we do kinda wanna avoid dying when the threat’s real. So things like “I’d like not to be eaten” tend to trump “what a lovely creature who deserves to live more than I” when the playing field’s suddenly equal and you’re in the ring with a wild beast. The apex predator wins. The winner gets to live. This leopard didn’t win.
Which leaves us with only one question.
When is Katy Perry going to reenact this for us live? Like the video?