Sending nested JSON from rails app to hapijs app

I'm using rails 3.4, node 9, and Hapi js 16.5.2
What i'm trying to do is send a nested JSON from a rails app to a hapi js app, but something weird is happening. I am using the Rest-Client request for sending a POST request. the JSON is of the following format:

data = {
    time => {
        start => "12.11.17",
        end => "13.11.17"
    },
    event => "party"
}

The request is of the following form:

RestClient::Request.new(
    :method => :post,
    :url => "mynodeserverroute",
    :payload => data
).execute

The problem is all the nested elements are sent really weirdly, instead of being of the form:

time: {
        start: "12.11.17",
        end: "13.11.17"
    }

It comes back in the form

"time[start]": "12.11.17", 
"time[end]": "13.11.17"

Which makes it challenging to verify later of. What am I doing wrong? I tried adding the following to the request:

:header => {
            :content_type => :json, 
            :accept => :json
}

but that didn't help as well. Is there a different method to send a JSON via rails?