Arshud Mahmood was born the son of a railroad doctor, and lived with his family on the Pakistan-India border, later moving to Quetta on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border for the remainder of his childhood and youth. He came to America in 1969 and received his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Over the next forty years Mahmood spent time along the Louisiana coast, in offshore Alaska, as well as in southern California, where he currently resides. His first book was titled A Village Clock: a Collection of Folk Tales.