[timlimfimbim]

I believe they were saying "at the rate".

[ANTSANTS]

Not sure why people are downvoting you. The @ symbol is hundreds of years old and originally meant "at the rate of" (as in, "10 boxes @ $1" means "10 boxes for $1 apiece"). It's perfectly possible that the Indian population could have picked this up and perhaps contracted it a bit during the reign of the British Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@_symbol

[demodifier]

That is indeed the case. The 'at the rate of' usage was quite popular in arithmetic problems even in the early 90s when most of the population was unaware of emails. My parents still say it as at the rate of when reading aloud an email address.

[tfgg]

I think this is the most interesting thing I've learnt from this thread: that most other countries didn't use @ as "at the rate of", and hence had names for the funny symbol on their typewriters that only began to be used with email addresses.

[madeofpalk]

They would say it when reading out their email address, exactly where I would normally say 'at'.