'I wan't peace', if we can't settle on our own, who will?

San Grewal, Staff Reporter, Toronto Star

TORONTO : Pream Anandarajah, clean cut and Toronto born, slides down low in the passenger seat. He looks cautiously over his right shoulder at a group of students gathered near his high school.

"That's them," he says, referring to the FOBs.

It's a common insult directed at recent immigrants that means "fresh off the boat," in this case, from Sri Lanka.

Though he doesn't follow much of his parents' Sri Lankan culture, Anandarajah wears a white symbol of mourning streaked across the middle of his forehead for his mother, Jeyaluckshmi, who is in Sunnybrook hospital's burn unit.

A firebomb filled with gas crashed through the living room window of the family's uninsured Scarborough bungalow on April 25, gutting the home. Nine young men have since been arrested for their involvement in the attack, threats against Anandarajah and other recent assaults.

The attack marked the eruption of a simmering conflict between recently arrived youth from Sri Lanka and those of the same descent who have lived here longer.

The tension is all about identity: the Canadian one that Sri Lankan youth born or raised here want to protect because that's how they fit in, and the Tamil one that recently arrived youth are most comfortable with, but are ridiculed for.

Frequently tossed around in the escalating feud between the groups is a loaded word, used to bully, label and shame. The mostly Tamil Sri Lankan youth around Scarborough who get called FOBs say the word is used as a weapon against them.

"It's like calling a black man, n---," says a Grade 10 student at Stephen Leacock Collegiate, where Anandarajah attends Grade 12.

The younger student is gathered after school with a half dozen friends that Anandarajah's group call FOBs.

The word and other slurs that accompany divisions within the same immigrant group have become common in the GTA.

In the 1980s, recently arrived Jamaican youth - "freshies" - were heckled by other Jamaican youth whose families had settled in the '60s and '70s. In Brampton's Springdale neighbourhood, turbaned Sikh youth recently arrived from India are commonly called "guru" and other derogatory terms by their "coconut" second-generation Punjabi-Canadian peers.

And CBCs (Canadian-born Chinese), or "bananas," also commonly use the term FOB to distance themselves from new Chinese immigrants.

According to Anandarajah and his friends, the current conflict involves about 150 youths in Scarborough from six high schools. Many have graduated or been expelled for the fighting over the last two years.

Anandarajah says because many of the rival Sri Lankan youth grew up in that country's violent civil war before escaping to Canada, they are using similar violence here.

But there are no religious or political issues: Most of the students involved on both sides are Hindu Tamils.

Hours before the firebombing, a friend of Anandarajah's was stabbed near Winston Churchill Collegiate.

Police investigating the stabbing say no arrests have been made yet. "There's two conflicting groups," said Det. Sgt. Rick Searl. "Pream has been helpful, but he hasn't been completely forthcoming. We know there's other stuff he knows."

After driving past Stephen Leacock Collegiate, Anandarajah returns to the small plaza diagonally across from the school, where four friends wait for him. This is the local "turf," controlled by whoever runs the show around the "BNS" (Birchmount `N' Sheppard) neighbourhood.

"They're scared to come here now," Anandarajah says proudly, referring to the "FOB" students still hanging around the side doors, just 200 metres away. "Since this happened a lot of people have a hate on for them." Half an hour passes, but the grades 10 and 11 students gathered near the school doors won't walk to their usual corner.

When approached they won't give their names, and talk reluctantly. One of the students begins calling his friend a FOB. "He's a real FOB, look at him, look at his hair." The rest of them pile on, hurling the term at the student, who tries to appear unfazed. They say the tension begins in high school.

They get harassed for playing cricket, having unfashionable hairdos, wearing tight-fitting shirts, too high pants and speaking Tamil.

They still play cricket and speak Tamil, but now look just like Anandarajah's friends, in their baggy jeans, and loose T-shirts or hoodies.

In changing fashions, they try to shed the FOB label and the stereotype that comes with it: nerdy, weird and unable to adjust. Now, perhaps to distance themselves from the widely used label, they call their fellow newcomers "FOBS."

Anandarajah says he no longer uses the term. "Not to their face. I use it to refer to them, but I wouldn't say it to them. I just don't know why they can't be more Canadian. It's the white kids who start calling them FOBs, not us.

"I used to dress the way they dress when they come here," he admits. Later in the afternoon he's met up with seven friends, six of Sri Lankan descent and one Iranian, at a parking lot near his high school. Hip-hop blares from the speaker system of a Honda Civic, as they explain why they don't like the FOBs.

"They can't speak English, they have these weird haircuts," says Chris, a Grade 12 student at nearby L'Amoreaux Collegiate. "The way they walk and they dress bad. It gives Sri Lankans a bad name, it's embarrassing." One of them blurts out that they're "fresh off the banana boat, they're all FOBs, Tiger Boys, and they always will be." Chris interjects.

"I wouldn't call them FOB, we're all Tamil. I wouldn't disgrace Tamil people. Some do, not me." They tell 17-year-old Madee, who used to be an FOB, to explain why he stopped hanging out with them. "To get girls, decent clothes."

He's wearing a pair of grey Air Force 1s, baggy faded jeans and a Rocawear shirt that hangs loosely over his large frame. Two earrings are fixed to his left ear. "I came over to Canada in Grade 6, six years ago.

Back then it didn't matter who you hung with. But they stopped hanging out with me because I talked to these guys." The differences seem minor. Unless you're in high school.

"It's stupid," Anandarajah says. "But when we're playing soccer, why do they have to come over and play cricket? We don't play cricket here." Anandarajah says it was older youths who were responsible for the attack on his house, most of whom either dropped out or have been expelled.

"I understand why they're angry, calling them FOBs. But they took it too far with this." Anandarajah, 18, stands 5-foot-6 and weighs about 115 pounds. His English is augmented with the odd Tamil phrase and some hip-hop slang.

He rattles off the names of gangs that he says recently arrived Sri Lankan youth have formed: EST (East Side Thugs); BNS; BNS Juniors; Tux Boys (Tuxedo Park); Tiger Boys; Gilders (Gilders Street).

Pink burn marks on Anandarajah's wrists, souvenirs from his rescue of two younger siblings and his mother during the fire, are the latest in a growing inventory of scars that cover his body. The most startling is a narrow, 2.5-centimetre-long wound that runs vertically on the left front of his neck and bears a distinct resemblance to the mark of a knife.

He says he was jumped by 12 students in the parking lot of his school last September and woke up in Grace Hospital after an ambulance brought his unconscious body there.

Touching his neck he says, "I don't know how I got this scar. It happened after I was knocked out. They beat me up real bad. My mom couldn't even recognize my face." The incident occurred as Anandarajah was leaving the school's property after he was suspended for beating up an FOB student the day before.

That fight was retaliation for an altercation the day before, when Anandarajah says he was jumped by a group of students.

While all this has gone on, the school's administration has done nothing to intervene, the students say. "They don't even know what's going on," Anandarajah says.

Stephen Leacock's principal echoes that sentiment. "I was not aware of any major issues that were going on," says principal George Benedek. "I mean it's no different than any other community, there's good stuff, there's bad stuff.

"We have had and continue to have school assemblies where we talk about the issues of bullying and harassment and in fact it's part of the curriculum." Anandarajah, for one, doesn't expect the school to resolve the problem. "I've done some pretty stupid things, I know that.

I'm older now, I want peace. My mom is in the hospital; she works two jobs for her kids and we're throwing all that away. My house is burned.

"This beef has gone way too far. If we can't settle it with our own, who will?"