In plain words
Tenāli Rāmakṛṣṇa stood up: “Mahārāja! It is not possible for me to go to my village and come back by tomorrow morning. So I shall stay tonight in this very town, think it over well, and come tomorrow morning to give the answer to your question,” he said. After the assembly ended, Rāmakṛṣṇa went to the house of his brother-in-law, who lived in that same town. For Rāmakṛṣṇa to sleep on that night, his brother-in-law arranged a cot and a mattress. Then Rāmakṛṣṇa, “Brother-in-law! The Mahārāja has asked a question. I must think hard about it tonight. If I lie on a mattress, I will sleep soundly. So have a cot put up for me in the cattle shed,” he said. As he wished, they set up a cot in the cattle shed. Stretching out on that cot, Rāmakṛṣṇa lay thinking about the question the Mahārāja had asked.
At one o'clock at night a cow in that cattle shed was ready to calve. Noticing this, Rāmakṛṣṇa got up, knocked on the door and said, “Brother-in-law! Brother-in-law! A cow is calving.” From inside, his brother-in-law asked, “Which cow is it, bāvā?” That was because, for his cows, Lakṣmī, Sarasvatī, Rādhā … were the names he had given.
The moment he heard these words, Rāmakṛṣṇa found the answer he needed. With a joy he could not contain, he too said, “Ē āv rā bā vā!” Again his brother-in-law asked, “Which cow is it, bāvā?” Rāmakṛṣṇa replied, “Ē āv rā bā vā!” He thought that, for want of proper sleep at night, his brother-in-law must have lost his wits.
Keeping “Ē āv rā bā vā!” in mind, Rāmakṛṣṇa rose in the small hours before dawn, bathed and went to the royal court. Rāyalu asked, “Has anyone brought an answer to the question I asked?” Rāmakṛṣṇa stood up: “Mahārāja! In the sentence ‘Ē āv rā bā vā!’ there are, just as you asked, five letters belonging to five languages. They give one and the same meaning in their own languages. In Marathi ‘ē’ means ‘come’. In the same way, whether you say ‘āv’ in Hindi or ‘rā’ in Telugu, ‘bā’ in Kannada or ‘vā’ in Tamil, the meaning is the same,” he said.