Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is one of those writers whose name immediately conjures up an image, in her case a double image. We see the heat and dust of India, particle by particle, usually through sympathetic and sometimes sentimental Western eyes. Almost simultaneously, we remember the Merchant-Ivory adaptations of E. M. Forster and the other films she has scripted with their heavy period detail. This collection of fourteen short stories, [East into Upper East] six set mostly in India, seven in wealthier enclaves of America and one in London, shows how easy it is to think the settings are the dominant feature of her work and how misleading such a judgment is. The exotic or familiar backgrounds, lovingly depicted, are a hallmark of her novels and of the work of Merchant—Ivory, but what matters in her books is the intensity of the emotions that she transmits.

Five of the Indian stories and two of the best of those set in America were first published in the New Yorker or other magazines. There is no new ground in these or the other stories. As in her eleven novels, Jhabvala sticks to what she is interested in—the personal rather than the public, the small picture rather than the wide screen—and she draws from the whole of her heritage, her childhood in Germany as the daughter of Polish Jews, her marriage since 1951 to an Indian architect and her residence in New York as well as Delhi since the 1970s. She writes about the intricacies of relationships in families and between friends or lovers, about possessive love and about alienation: her people are nearly always trying to discover where they belong.

In “Two Muses”, for example, a young woman recalls her grandfather Max (shades of the narrator of Heat and Dust tracing the history of her step-grandmother) and the two women who underpinned his life. He is an appallingly egotistical German refugee writer of alleged genius who settled in Hampstead. His wife, Lilo, is his beauteous, grand, distant inspiration, and his dashing mistress, Netta, is the practical force who makes their existence in exile possible, organizing his work, taking a job as a dentist's receptionist to pay the bills. To illustrate the difference between the women, their complementary natures and two aspects of Germany, Lilo's furniture in their Hampstead flat is solidly Biedermeier and Netta's in her nearby flat in St John's Wood is tubular Bauhaus. In Jhabvala's novel In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), Regi had that same tubular furniture in the smart Park Avenue flat where she entertained her circle of fellow refugees from Austria and Germany. The characters surround themselves with the past from which they have been displaced. The background indicates where they stand but is not central to the argument.

The stifling feel of the past is also important in “Fidelity”, symbolized by Sophie's heavily curtained apartment which she inherited from her parents, including fixtures and fittings from her German grandparents. Sophie grew up with the idea that you had to keep the sunlight out to stop the upholstery from fading. She is long separated from her philandering husband, Dave, but he still telephones almost daily. In some ways Sophie is like an Anita Brookner heroine. She is rich, buys a lot of clothes, likes cakes and is essentially a quiet person. By contrast, Dave is a vital force, full of charm and tricks. To underline their difference, he and his sister are Sephardic Jews, to Ahkenazic Sophie, “exotic, semi-oriental”. Michael, her nephew, like many Jhabvala characters, asserts his identity and shows his confusion by heading East and then spending time with Sufis in upstate New York and Hasidim in Brooklyn. The story is about the ties that bind them all as Sophie is secretly dying of cancer, and about the way they continue to manipulate and depend on each other until death parts them. It escapes being mawkish because the observation is acute and it is funny.

The welcome element of humour often has an ironic tinge. Jhabvala is a storyteller who does not take sides, but does expose her characters' weaknesses. This works well in “Broken Promises”, where she explores the confrontation of values between a mother and daughter. Donna, the rich mother, has lunch parties with Tarot readings and suffers from a weak heart. Reba, the daughter, is a strong young woman, a vegetarian conservationist living in a woodland cabin. She is a lesbian, and her lover works in her mother's neighbourhood gourmet cheese shop. “Reba's more the intellectual type”, Donna tells her friends when they are discussing their daughters. The contrasts between the generations are schematic, and both women are daft, but their dilemmas and the interaction between them, Reba's struggle for freedom and Donna's dazed acceptance of what happens, are credible.

Less successful is her study, in “Bobby”, of a lesbian relationship torn apart by the psychotic son of one of the women. Once again, the details of the story are beguiling, with everyone's lifestyle carefully delineated, but what is important is the ties that bind the characters. Claire is more attached to Bobby than Madeleine, who has to take him, too, if she wants to keep Claire. The reasons why otherwise sane people stick to untenable situations are dissected more subtly in “A Summer by the Sea”, when a wife says of her bisexual husband: “No one ever tells me that it's wrong for me to love Mother for the way she is and not for how she is supposed to be.”

Such themes are perhaps more obvious in the Western stories, but if the ethnic (and sometimes too folksy) settings of the East are stripped away, the preoccupations of Jhabvala are the same. Sinister intruders who attach themselves to unaccountably gullible people are the subject of “Parasites”, “Temptress” and “Great Expectations” in the American stories. Similarly, it is a stranger who is the catalyst in the opening (and perhaps most memorable) story of the collection, “Expiation”, which is about the seduction into crime and murder of the youngest boy in a simple merchant family. There is nothing crude about the deadpan narration by Bablu's older brother, wondering why the boy was different from the start and why he chafed at the normal bonds of attachment, as if waiting to be taken away to another life. The story could be transposed to the Upper East Side or Islington, despite the particularities of Indian life which give it poignancy. This universality is perhaps why Jhabvala's Indian stories, moving as they usually are, seem the product of an observer rather than an insider.

Can the contrasts between the old and the new, whether in changing India or the rushing world of America, the mutual dependence of husband and wife in any culture, the universal anger of adolescence and the disappointments of age, be fully explored in the short story? Jhabvala is concerned with stating emotional dilemmas rather than developing arguments, so the form has always suited her well. In many stories of this collection, a stream of incidents brings the initial situation to a breathless but satisfactory conclusion. In others which are quieter and more reflective a resolution is not the point.