When Arya causes an accident confining his mother to a coma, this angry, rebellious teen needs to battle the 10 - headed demon king in the land of the Ramayana mythology, in order to learn how to conquer his own inner demon before journeying home to save his mother.

SYNOPSIS:

This is the magical, coming-of-age tale of Arya, a sixteen-year-old boy from San Francisco, who is tormented by inner demons. Anything to do with his ethnicity — food, traditions or the fascinating mythological stories he has been raised with, has become the building block of unpleasant social expe- riences. In a moment of anger, he causes an accident that confines his mother to a coma. Her once-vi- brant self is now kept alive by tubes and machines in a hospital ward. Arya clings to the only remnant of their bond: an old, battered copy of the Ramayana, India’s ancient epic story of Prince Rama’s battle against demons. He picks up the mythology book in an attempt to heal her through its verses but finds himself quantum tunneled into the Wild Woods, the world of its ancient stories.

In this mythical story world, Ravana, the demon king, strategizes to destroy Arya’s Ramayana— the last copy left—and threatens to rewrite history from his evil perspective. Arya enlists the aid of vari- ous the characters from the mythology:

• Rishiji - an immortal sorcerer-sage that has been walking the earth for thousands of years since the days of the Ramayana. He was Prince Rama’s guru and trained him in the ancient warrior arts.

• Vanaras - primates from the Old World Tribes, who are something between man and monkey. In the original Ramayana story, they formed an army under the captaincy of Hanuman, to help Prince Rama in his battle against Ravana.

  With the assistance of these characters and an urgent need to get back home to save his moth- er, Arya is faced with the challenge of battling demons in the Wild Woods. Rishiji inducts him into the martial techniques of ‘the Arya people’ with three arrows one made of bronze, one of silver, and one of gold. However these are no ordinary arrows, they are infused with the Agneyasthra, the divine weapon of fire which can wreak havoc if used in haste or without strategic thinking. Arya uses his first arrow to shoot down a forest demon who threatens to eat a group of baby vanaras. But even though he believes he is protecting the vanaras from this demon, he acts in haste and ends up setting fire to their forest home, and causes grave injury to Pandu, one particular member of the vanara tribe. The mishap sets him off towards the backwaters of the forest in search of ‘Deep Medicine’ to cure Pandu. Accompanied by three vanaras (Chimpu, Ranga and Raja), he encounters the Medicine Woman, a magical healer who conjures spells from the power of rainbows, and utilizes quantum entanglement to heal people in a broad spectrum of worlds and dimensions. Arya find her distinctly familiar but cannot place her.

  The Medicine Woman urges him to explore the value of medicinal plants by sending him deeper into the forest. This sets off tension among the three vanaras who recognizing sinister foliage understand that they are now approaching the Dark Side of the Wild Woods where the demons reside. Arya is lured closer and closer to the Dark Side by a shape-shifter demon who leads him headlong into an army of demons. Arya uses his silver arrow in a show of self-defense to destroy the approaching army of demons.

  With one golden arrow left and the challenge of rescuing his Ramayana book from the clutches of Ravana (to save the Ramayana story), Arya guided by Rishiji (and with the protection of the Medicine Woman) must enlist the support of Chimpu to gather an army of vanaras and their lower-order monkey cousins (just as Hanuman did for Prince Rama in the original Ramayana mythology) to assist him in his final battle against Ravana, the ultimate demon king and fiercest of them all.

  Contrary to Arya’s expectations, in the final battle, Ravana turns out to be not the ten-headed demon described in the Ramayana mythology, but rather ten facets of demons in his ordinary world, the tenth and most sinister one being his shadow self. This ‘tenth head’ is how he exits in his Shadow Realm as Arya of Ravana’s Passion, the representation of himself (i.e. his shadow self plagued and tormented by inner demons) once Ravana (i.e. evil) has taken over his mental-physical state. Arya realizes he has no choice but to shoot his very last arrow at Arya of Ravana’s Passion, an action to vanquish and destroy his inner demons in order to save the story of Prince Rama and return home to tackle the demons in his ordinary world.

  At the culmination of this battle, Arya discovers that the Medicine Woman is in fact an aspect of his mother — not mother as he knows her back home in a coma, but rather her ‘True Self ‘i.e. the state of her soul-being that exists in the spacetime of eternal happiness.

  Now that he knows that she is happiest as her True Self, he realizes that he no longer needs to save her but rather that he needs to let her go, Instead, he must return home to heal the grieving heart of his father with the therapeutic verses of the Ramayana.