Fire a rocket you built yourself into a sky that has been dry too long

A stir beside the launch rail, the fuse lit, a hiss — and a rocket longer than a man tears up into the sky trailing white smoke, everyone tipping their heads back to chase that smoke until it shrinks to a point and vanishes. The air is all the scorch of gunpowder, the ground left faintly numb by the recoil, the tremor still in the soles. Then the cheering — the higher it flies, the longer it hangs, the more face for the village that built it.

The Rocket Festival is in May, before the rains come. Isan's land often goes short of water, and these home-made great rockets fired into the sky are a way of asking heaven for rain. A very old legend is told here: the Toad King, Phaya Khankhak, led all beings up to heaven to demand rain from Phaya Thaen, the god who rules the rains, and having won, the god promised — so long as people made rockets and sent sound up to the sky, he would send the rain down. So these thunderous reports are that ancient pact, still earnestly kept every year.

A villager burnt dark by the sun crouches beside his rocket, checking the winding of the powder one last time, his expression graver than a groom's at a wedding — the prayer wound round and round into the powder, waiting to be sent up with one great boom. The Yasothon area is the most exacting; some rockets stand several metres tall and take several men to carry, and village against village has been quietly competing all year.

A few friends meant only to watch from a distance, and were swept right into the mood. When a rocket flies well, the whole field roars together; the teams whose rockets fail or veer off are shoved, to everyone's laughter, into the mud pool beside, climbing out caked head to foot, laughing loudest of all. Later the few of them were splashed with mud too, shoes soaked through, the slurry baking warm in the sun, yet not one of them wanted to leave.

One rocket falls back into the field, and the next is set on the rail. Standing outside the safety line, the smell of powder in the nose, the ears still ringing, the sun baking the back of the neck hot. Those few short seconds of quiet before each ignition are always the most taut — everyone holding their breath, watching whether that line of white smoke will streak up beautifully.

I think you too will hear, beneath all this clamour, a kind of earnestness — in a place that lives by the weather, what everyone says with the loudest sound and the highest rocket is in fact the plainest of wishes: let it rain. And to stand in the same field with a band of friends, set laughing by the same rocket and splashed into the same mud together — that kind of pure delight, perhaps, is something only this place can give.