With her customary quiet confidence, Anita Desai establishes her territory in the opening paragraph, sometimes in the opening sentence, of each of the nine stories in [Diamond Dust]. From the start of “Royalty,” we know not just that the Indian household is off to the hills to escape the summer heat of Delhi but that they are rich and Oxford-educated: not only have so many of their clothes been packed away but so have their books and papers. In the next story, “Winterscape,” a young woman with a baby in her arms is standing in front of a refrigerator looking at some photographs. Immediately we sense this story is set in a land of green lawns and new cars, not serviced by the dusty old Ambassadors with which Desai often evokes India. “‘That dog will kill me, kill me one day!’ Mrs Das moaned,” is the first sentence of the title story, “Diamond Dust.” It is a good enough summary of the plot, though the victim is different.

Desai's style does not change. She continues to pile up the sensuous descriptive details as background, while retaining an almost icy lucidity in her narrative of plot. The first of her three novels to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Clear Light of Day, published twenty years ago, etched with finest strokes every aspect of Tara's decaying childhood home and of the domain of her family's rich Muslim neighbour.

Now, in “Underground,” Desai's eye lingers over the tacky displays of the shops selling everything from flip-flops to fudge in a Cornish seaside town, and the bare mattress in the ghastly hostel in Iraq, remembered by the reluctant owner of the Cornish boarding house, too weighted down by previous loss to let his rooms. The tourists who provide the framework of the story are the excuse for him to recall his past on the way down to opening the door to them. Sometimes this listing of items becomes tedious. The courtyard, hung with birdcages, some of them empty, of the house in a provincial Mexican town to which young Louis returns to visit his Chekhovian aunt, sets the scene admirably, but there is the facile feel of the tourist's notebook about the Sunday market later described, full of young girls with “tinted hair, painted nails and laughing mouths.”

It is clear from these stories that Desai's interests are the same as ever, but over the years she has refined and elaborated them. When she started writing about loneliness, loss and dislocation as it affected people born in India or with Indian connections, she was one of the first in the field (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala being another interpreter across cultures). Today, there are many writers, men as well as women, who describe with similar intensity the nostalgia of exile, the disappointments of returning home and the conflict between the old and the new which torments India. Thus Rakesh in “Winterscape,” a subtle and touching tale, lives with his wife Beth in Toronto and has difficulties in reconciling past and present, difficulties shared with characters in the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has recently won a Pulitzer Prize.

Younger authors also hold up for wonder fading aspects of Indian family culture, in particular the bonds between sisters and the role of the aunt. Beth in “Winterscape,” an apple-pie Canadian girl, shudders at the thought of handing her new baby over to her sister, Susan. This is what Rakesh's mother, Anu, did to her sister Asha, for a number of complicated, sad reasons which Beth begins to understand. Aunts and sisters were the theme of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's 1999 novel Sister of My Heart, but no one paints the role of the aunt as tellingly as Desai. There was a pivotal Mira-masi in Clear Light of Day and a mystic Mira-masi in Fasting, Feasting. In addition, Desai does not front her works crudely with mythology, but it is there in the background. She makes reincarnation and the attraction of disappearing from one's present life compelling in “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown,” an idea which was important in Sunetra Gupta's recent A Sin of Colour.

The struggle of women for a separate identity is at the heart of the longest and perhaps most impressive of these stories, “The Rooftop Dwellers.” It is a theme explored by many but none better than Desai. She delicately suggests that Moyna is timid at heart, despite her bid for independence. (Uma, the plain, almost backward daughter in Fasting, Feasting is another reluctant Desai heroine.) A recent graduate in English, Moyna is living by herself in Delhi as assistant on a struggling literary journal. Books is financed by an MP from Calcutta who misses the intellectual atmosphere of his home city. The small establishment is a masterly comic creation, drawn with wit, love and a measure of bitterness.

Throughout the story, Desai uses humour to engage her reader and pinpoint the dilemmas. The terrible Bhallas, who rent to Moyna at an extortionate rate their rooftop barsati or shed, are first seen all sitting on the big parental bed watching the Sunday-evening episode of the Mahabharata on television, like the rest of Delhi. To most prospective landlords the idea of a young, attractive lone female renting their property is as dangerous as a fiery arrow in the epic, but the Bhallas are too greedy, and their barsati too ramshackle, for them to care. The others in Moyna's life, from the forbidden kitten she adopts, to her emancipated boss and friend (another Tara), to her own mother who comes on a visit and forges an unwelcome alliance with Mrs Bhalla, all put her choices into perspective. Desai is easy to read, but the under-currents beneath the surface of her stories are dangerous.