A. J. Thomas was born in Kerala, in the foothills of the Western Ghats (Sahyadri), in the valley of Mount Illickan. For the first ten years of his life, he lived in a hill-hamlet, Mechal. When he moved from Wyanad in 1976, to work with the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation, he had the opportunity to see internationally famous writers like Dominique Lapierre, Sir Angus Wilson, Salman Rushdie, and Indian writers like Pritish Nandy, M. T. Vasudevan Nair and others, who inspired him.