Celebrating Diwali!
When I was thinking about the festival of Diwali, I was reminded that it was to commemorate and celebrate the event of Rama killing Ravana. Along with the bursting of firecrackers, I’ve seen celebrations in North India where they burn effigies of Ravana filled with firecrackers resulting in dazzling displays of light and color.
This created an image in my head of Ravana actually bursting like a firecracker when Rama killed him, literally becoming a symbol for the festival of light. The second departure I had was from traditional depictions of Ravana with 10 heads. I thought to myself, attaching 10 separate heads to a neck would be anatomically impossible! But if he had heads in all directions, then they would fit neatly on one neck. Also, you could only see a few at a time, so all you needed to do was to convey the illusion that there were more heads around the corner. And this is what I came up with :-)