4. hunt & peck; At an Indian palace, Sally Singer logs on for truly global holiday shopping.(Jodhpur, India)

Byline: Sally Singer

It's six in the morning, and I'm in a palace in Jodhpur. I'm wide awake, partly because I'm jangling from the party I've just left (held to mark the launch of Vogue India) and partly because I'm still on New York time. I decide to shop: Not, you might think, the first thing one would do after an evening of hobnobbing with Bollywood glitterati, but then you must remember that India is utterly inspiring and that moreover there is something luxurious, even decadent, about curling up in bed with a hotel laptop that a bellman, dressed in a silk ensemble and apparently escaped from a Wes Anderson movie, has delivered to your room. Besides, it's late September, and I'm not a last-minute type. Christmas shopping feels deliciously pressing. So onto the Web I go.

A declaration: I'm also not really an Internet kind of girl. I've never been in a chat room, I don't blog, and I can't face Facebook. When I do venture virtually, it is usually in order to deal in the dullest of necessities: bulk groceries, air tickets. The fact is, as a consumer, I am irredeemably terrestrial. I like a hanger and a shopping bag. I prefer to pick up an item than to click on it. Nonetheless, I am not above a certain determined browsing. By contrast with those who search for a category of item (e.g., "fur gauntlet glove") or who are experts in online retailers, I Google the specific names of my favorite designers and small stores around the world and see what, if anything, they have to offer: I don't, in other words, surf to explore.

Then again, you never know what you'll find. For my mother, I searched for VBH, Bruce Hoeksema's line of extremely discreet, impeccably made accessories, because mothers are (or should be) beyond the whims of fashion, and VBH is classic. This took me to net-a-porter.com, where I found a VBH clutch in a shimmery gold, which as it happens is very on trend as well as beyond fashion. Since I'm there, I may as well take a look round (by designer). Sipping my masala tea, I get a fawn-colored, long-bodied V-neck sweater by Vanessa Bruno that looks as slouchy as it does hip for my performance-artist nanny, who lives ...