Makharda lies at the edge of Kolkata, a township whose ground is broken by more than twenty ponds. Bharat Sikka’s Ripples in the Pond begins there, but water is less a subject than a method: still surfaces that hold what a place remembers alongside what it is losing.

The project is a process-based photographic inquiry rather than a survey of a locality. Sikka works where memory, modernity and infrastructural encroachment meet, and the book’s understanding of place accumulates: the slow violence of roads, drainage and construction registered across a landscape of standing water. What emerges is a township pictured as a site of convergence, where temporalities usually kept apart become visible at once.

Ripples in the Pond is a single-artist volume, published by Fw: in 2025 as a 144-page paperback. The length suits the patience of the inquiry; this is a book built for sequence rather than for isolated images, and it sits within a mode of photographic publishing in which a place is studied over time instead of documented in passing.

For a collector the interest is precise. Sikka gives an entire book to one locality and to a question — how infrastructure rewrites a place, and how that place is remembered — that runs through urban studies and environmental history, and that he approaches through photographs rather than documents. The location is small on a map; its implications are not. The value lies in the clarity of the premise and the completeness of the attention paid to a single site.