Ramesh was three years younger than me and my earliest memories are of him tagging behind me all the time . . . where I went, he followed. I am told I tolerated this puppy-dog behaviour with considerable good humour, and as he was a very shy little boy I tended to speak for both us. Often, when we had visitors at home, I was asked to coax him out from under his bed where he would have hidden himself, too bashful for social niceties.

His primary school teachers absolutely adored him and made it obvious in his school reports that he was a pleasure to teach. At home, this translated into a stubborn and blind faith in whatever the teacher had said, which amused my parents most of the time, but drove them mad on occasion. As a child, Ramesh took school very seriously. Going to school was what big children did.

It was where teachers taught and he learnt exactly. They issued instructions and he followed precisely. If teacher asked for an 80page copy to be brought in, an 88page one just wouldn't do. When teacher said clouds were grey, they had to be coloured grey and if my mother dared suggest a white one he would shake his head sagely and say, "But teacher saidf" The phrase became a family joke.

The two of us had a perfect childhood in every way . . . my father was in the army, which meant that though we were never ever flush with money, we had things we loved: a sprawling army-barrack house set in a massive tree-filled garden, a huge and constantly growing collection of books and a pet dog whose mongrel antecedents we were constantly trying to determine using pictures in the How and Why Book of Dogs.

I don't quite know why some memories linger and others fade into oblivion, but I do remember vividly an idyllic two weeks during a time of serious military conflict.

In December 1971, during the Indo-Pakistan war, when Ramesh was six years old, we were living in Kanpur in the north of India. For 15 days of the war, the city remained under strict black-out at night and our house like many others had an air-raid shelter dug in the garden. It was just a trench, a hole in the ground, but the two of us had it converted into a den within no time, kitting out the tiny space with cushions, books, toys and food, which we smuggled out of the house despite my mother saying we were not to. It was the best hidey-hole-spy-base-clubhouse any two kids could have ever had, situated as it was within quick reach of vital supplies via the backdoor to the kitchen. After the war was over, we didn't just fill up the hole . . . instead we followed instructions in a book on bird watching and converted the trench into a hide, persuaded our grandmother to make up camouflage suits from old green curtains and then sat motionless for hours watching common garden sparrows, magpies and crows, not just thinking but knowing that we were pioneers at the cutting edge of ornithology.

Ramesh did discover birds, eventually. Before that he grew up, got braces for his terrible buck teeth and spent a lot of time fighting with me. Our fights were vicious and my parents never knew what to make of the new dynamic between their two teenage children. I was told to be kind to my younger brother, he was told to be respectful to his older sister, but we carried on regardless. However, it turned out that we were normal, it was all a phase and by the time I finished school and went on to university we had, miraculously, outgrown the squabbling and our relationship matured into a close friendship. Ramesh was 15 and had undergone the most remarkable change . . . gone was all that shy awkwardness, my brother was now the classic golden boy. He was very gregarious, really handsome, an absolutely brilliant student, a gifted sportsman and to crown it, all his friends' mothers loved him. I was so proud of him and wished I had his incredible ability to study, party and play hard.

Like so many of those who have died on the roads in the last few weeks in Ireland, my brother was young. He was in a car with five other friends and he was driving.

There was no other vehicle involved and he had very obviously lost control . . . speed was the most likely cause. Just like many of the bereaved families last week, we also got that ominous midnight phone call to say there had been an accident. I can never forget rushing to the scene, all the while thinking he would probably have nothing more than a broken arm.

Halfway there, we met the ambulance and as we quickly turned around to follow it. I remember repeatedly asking my fiancee, who was a final-year medical student then, why the ambulance was going so slowly. Years later, my husband confessed that though he knew it immediately, he did not have the heart to tell me that it was because my brother was in all probability dead. In fact, Ramesh had died on the spot, from a severe head injury. The car was an unrecognisable wreck, but thankfully all five of his friends survived unscathed.

Can you take comfort in the fact that the funeral was massive? All those sincere words of consolation and none of it mattered at all. We were inconsolable. We just never knew that he had so many friends.

Many came who we didn't know at all, each with their own story about how Ramesh had touched their lives with his good humour and generosity. I remember thinking . . . this kind of stuff only happens in tribute documentaries about somebody very old and famous. We immersed his ashes into the sea, according to the Hindu custom, and then it was all over, 19 years of his life snuffed out in an instant and all traces of his physical presence wiped out in a matter of hours.

The day after the funeral was the first day of the rest of our lives.

Where do I start? How do I put in words how my father and mother were crushed by their loss, what it meant to see their son being cremated? How do I explain why we were never the same father, mother and daughter again? Some crosses you carry with you to your grave, but some crosses drag you to the grave. I know my father began dying that day, slowly and sadly of a broken heart. After two short weeks off work, he had to go back and carry on making a living despite feeling that life was not worth living. He put on a brave face and spoke about Ramesh a lot, but over the years, I could see he was jealous of other people and their sons, often putting them down without realising what he was doing. A very rational man, he turned to astrologers, constantly wanting to know what else the future had in store for him. Maybe he thought he could pre-empt any other cruel twists that fate might have in store.

My mother found everyday things too heartrending. Sadness is a cruel thing . . . it sits on her shoulder and whispers all day, tainting her senses with bitterness and regret, silently invading even her dreams, making sure sleep can never be a refuge. She stopped baking after my brother died.

Even as a young man of 19, he would hang around, waiting to lick the remains of the cake mix off the bowl and would badger my mother to serve whatever she had made as soon as it came out of the oven. It was not uncommon for her to make one cake for Ramesh and one for the rest of us, for he and his friends were the biggest fans of my mother's cooking. My mother, her faith far from being shattered, found succour in religion . . . she constantly bargains with a whole pantheon of Gods and prays to my brother, to keep me, her only remaining child, safe.

As for me, I have gone from thinking it could never happen to me, to believing if it happened once, it can happen again. Earlier on that fateful evening, Ramesh had come into my room, dressed and ready to go, to ask me if I thought he looked okay. He did that often, trusting me to give him the critical eye. Not in that shirt, I said and he went off and returned in something else. What do you think now, he asked looking at himself in the mirror. You'll look fine if you'd stop the posing, I said. He laughed, pulled up a chair, sat down and we gossiped about the friends he was meeting up with and more importantly who was going out with whom. I made my Big Sister pronouncements on which couples would last and even placed a few bets with him. He continued non-stop . . . he was very excited about the flying lesson he had had that morning, hoping my father would be able to go and watch him the next time. He had exams coming up in his engineering college, after which he and his mates were planning a 10-day trek in the Himalayas. That was my brother Ramesh, he lived life to the full.

Twenty one years on, I panic because very often, in my mind's eye, I just can't remember what he looked like, I can't picture his smiling face as he picked up the car keys, said bye to my mother and walked out of the house. I know he would have made a brilliant uncle to my children and I might have had nieces and nephews of my own. He would have been 40 this year, and what a party that would have been. If only he hadn't died. If only.