A thousand utility leaf

We were staying in a small coastal town of Karwar in Karnataka, about seven kilometres from south of Goa. My two-year-old daughter was not able to acclimatise. I was giving her anti-allergics and antibiotics, but she kept catching cold. One day, my friend in Karwar, Megha Gaonkar, told me about the medicinal powers of a plant called saveer sambar soppu in Kannada. It means a thousand utility leaf. The leaves smelled like ajwain or carom seeds. But Gaonkar said it was some other plant. “Boil 10 to 12 leaves in about a glass of water till one third the amount is left. The decoction will act as a great cold and cough reliever,” she told me. It worked. My daughter recovered within five days.