A bag of lemons.

During holidays in Cairo, whether Muslim feasts or Christian ones, there's a phrase you're bound to hear repeatedly, which roughly translates as 'may your every year be good'. However genuine the sentiment, the saying often carries a well-known subtext--'tis the season to tip more heavily than usual.

Holidays are cause for consternation as well as celebration. Average Egyptians, whose belts are already unconscionably tight, need extra food for families and guests as well as new clothes for the kids. Generosity at these times is especially appreciated, so you try and really let go, to empty your pockets whenever possible in an attempt to share the prevailing and specious hope that god will see fit to refill them.

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Just after the recent feast, I went vegetable shopping, and having purchased several mud-laden bunches of spinach, some dented tomatoes and dusty potatoes--typical fare--stopped by the lemon lady. I call her the lemon lady because that's what she sells, in the sun all day, sitting on a cinder-block in the street at exhaust-pipe level. In summer, she props a broken umbrella between her feet and her wares; sometimes she just balances a half-full sack of lemons on her head. I've seen her breast-feed her child, there in the street, mother's milk laced with carbon monoxide. Although I've had ample occasion to admire her carved features, and how her country-style dress billows around her straight-backed squat, I've somehow never asked her name.

It is well known in Cairo that vendors rarely have change, especially in the morning. I had a single, tired and disintegrated one-pound note, but at the last minute decided to give her a ten, which isn't much, but it was crisp and about ten times what is called for. She looked up at me, shaking her head. When I said I didn't need change, and expressed the wish that her every year be good, she insisted I take several more handfuls of fat green lemons. 'I don't need them,' I told her. 'Make juice,' she said. I felt embarrassed by her generosity, which so exceeded mine. Walking away with a bulging bag, I berated myself for having only given her ten pounds and for even considering giving her one.

Having lived so long in a place where the average monthly income is less than a sum I can earn in several hours, virtually every cash transaction is fraught with this sort of self-doubt. Do I really need another contour sheet, or to take multiple vitamins, when there are homeless children sleeping on my doorstep? This awareness of inequity can be paralyzing, but it is also instructive. As an American, I must remind myself that being better-off doesn't necessarily mean knowing any better; indeed, being right is not among the inalienable ones. But it's an arbitrary universe, I'm convinced of it, and this absolves me temporarily.

My ruminations came to a halt, a little later, at the pharmacy, when fumbling among the lemons for my money, I realized I couldn't find the hundred-pound note I was sure I took when I left the house. Then it dawned on me: the hundred-pound notes resemble the ten-pound ones, so I must have given it to the lemon lady.

I was instantly pleased and more at ease recalling how enthusiastically she'd forced me to take so many extra lemons. One hundred pounds, after all, buys a lot of them. But yes, I was happy that I'd given her something to be excited about, and reminded myself of it so many times while walking home that I grew embarrassed at the pleasure it gave me, this unintentional gift for which I deserved no credit. Yet I was secretly proud to have surrendered the money, no trifling amount, so remorselessly.

At home, unpacking my bag, at the very bottom amidst the lemons, I found the hundred pound note--and felt like a maundering ass. I was struck anew with the woman's gladness in receiving the boon of ten measly pounds, and her compulsion to share it immediately and give back. My humility was restored (temporarily no doubt, and arbitrarily) alongside the knowledge that giving is a qualitative not quantitative matter, by a woman whose name, I've since learned, is Nadia.

Maria Golia also writes for The Middle East, reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and is the author of the non-fiction Cairo, City of Sand (Reaktion Books, 2004).

An impulsive gift during the holiday season raises some unexpected thoughts in Maria Golia.