The Polaroid on the Kiosk

The old kiosk on Obalende Bridge had been selling newspapers and recharge cards for thirty years. But what made people stop wasn’t the MTN scratch cards. It was the string.

A thin nylon line stretched across the front of the kiosk, and clipped to it with tiny wooden pegs were dozens of Polaroids.

No price tags. No “₦500 each”. Just pictures, swaying in the Lagos breeze.

I didn’t notice them for months. I was always rushing past on my way to Yaba Market. But one rainy Thursday I was waiting under the kiosk roof for the rain to ease up, and I actually looked.

There was a picture of two schoolboys in 1998, both holding a single ice cream cone between them, grinning like they’d won the lottery.
Another of an old woman dancing at a naming ceremony, wrapper tied high, eyes closed like nobody was watching.
One of a danfo driver asleep on his steering wheel with a cutlass leaning against the seat — somehow that one felt peaceful, not dangerous.

The kiosk owner was Baba Tunde. Seventy, missing two teeth, always wearing a faded Chelsea cap.

“Who took them?” I asked him.

He smiled. “I did. With this.” He pulled out a battered Polaroid camera from under the counter. The kind that spits the photo out right away and smells like chemicals.

“But why leave them here?” I said. “Why not sell them?”

Baba Tunde shrugged. “Because people forget sweet moments. I just hang them so they remember.”

He told me he started in 1995 after his wife died. She loved taking pictures at weddings and birthdays, but nobody ever printed them. They stayed in albums nobody opened. When she passed, he found a box of her undeveloped film. He developed them and realized — sweet moments die twice if nobody looks at them again.

So he started carrying his camera everywhere. Market day. Church service. A child’s first day in primary school. A couple’s first date at the beach. He’d take the picture, give one copy to the people, and hang the second on his string.

“Most people never come back for it,” he said. “But that’s okay. Someone else will see it and say, ‘That reminds me of my own brother’ or ‘That looks like my wedding day’. Sweetness should be shared.”

I started coming back every week.

One day I saw a picture of myself. Three months ago, laughing with Aisha from the tailoring shop while she tried to fix my torn trouser pocket. I didn’t even know he’d taken it. I was standing there with water dripping from my cap and a grin I didn’t know I had.

I didn’t take it down. I left it there.

Two weeks later it was gone.

Baba Tunde saw me looking. “Someone took it,” he said. “A young man. He stood here for five minutes, then folded it and put it in his wallet. Didn’t say a word.”

“Shouldn’t you charge him?” I asked.

Baba Tunde shook his head. “That picture did what it was supposed to do. It found the person who needed it.”

A month later I saw him again. The young man. He was standing in front of the kiosk, holding a new Polaroid of his own. It was a picture of him and his father, both smiling. Baba Tunde was clipping it to the string.

The young man caught me looking and said, “That was my father before he passed. I found his picture here last month. The one with me laughing. I didn’t know he had kept it from when I was a child. I went to his house after and we talked for the first time in three years. He died last week.”

He pointed at the new picture. “Now he gets to stay on the string too.”

Baba Tunde nodded and said what he always said: “Sweetness doesn’t die. It just waits for the right person to see it.”

I don’t rush past the kiosk anymore.

Sometimes I stand there for ten minutes, looking at pictures of strangers’ birthdays, strangers’ laughter, strangers’ goodbyes. And somehow they don’t feel like strangers anymore.

Because a sweet moment, once it’s seen, belongs to everyone.

And the rain can fall all it wants. The pictures don’t get wet. Baba Tunde covers them with a transparent nylon sheet he changes every month.

The string is still there today. Still full. Still swaying.

And if you ever walk past Obalende Bridge and see a Polaroid of a boy fixing a trouser pocket while a girl laughs at him — that’s me. Leave it there. Someone else might need it one day.

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