You could describe a statistical Scarborough that glimmers like a perfect mirage of the Canadian myth. It is the greenest of Toronto’s suburbs, with a network of ravines moving through its 187 square kilometres like fault lines. The eastern border is the lush and extensive Rouge River Valley, which contains the 287-hectare Toronto Zoo. It is the youngest suburb, rapidly growing, and the city’s—as well as one of the country’s—most forceful exercise in multiculturalism (54 per cent of its residents are foreign-born, compared to the Canadian average of 19 per cent).

Yet Scarborough remains a symbol of a certain kind of alienation. When it was a homogeneous suburb in the 1960s and ’70s, it symbolized drab conformity, a largely white unhipness that was sneered at. Now it’s diverse and a symbol of a different kind of alienation, one that carries a hint of menace rather than com­placency. The spectre of ethnic gangs, of sectarian tension, floats through it. Like the old cliché of Scarberia (a term that was coined in the 1960s, connoted exile and has now gone out of use, it seems), this new Scarborough (whose occasional appellatives Scarlem and Scartown imply race or violence and haven’t been adopted with any widespread enthusiasm) is a combination of truth and caricature.

This past September, Dineshkumar Murugiah, a 16-year-old student at Scarborough’s Winston Churchill Collegiate, was stabbed to death in what appeared to be a targeted attack. The murder, the city’s 57th of the year, didn’t resonate in the media. It didn’t have the narrative that the death of 15-year-old Jane Creba had in 2005, when she was hit by gang gunfire near the Eaton Centre on Boxing Day, a shooting Citytv called “the most notorious crime in recent Toronto history.” The theme in that story was the notion of innocence, and how an alien (and largely suburban) threat had come to the core and taken the life of an innocent bystander. With Dinesh, the notion of innocence was compromised, as the murder appeared, on the surface, to be retributive, and both the crime and the narrative were contained within Scarborough, rendering it tragic but somehow familiar.

Dinesh, the papers suggested, may have been embroiled in “Tamil reprisals” that had followed him from a previous school (he had attended two other high schools in the past two years). But both Detective Sergeant Gary Grinton of the homicide squad and Pastor David Loganathan of the Miracle Family Temple said Dinesh had no known gang ties. And then this comment to a reporter, from a student at Winston Churchill, a girl who was undisturbed by the event that had occurred an hour earlier, and who stood with an equally giddy friend: “We can pretend to be upset for you.” Presumably, she had seen tearful teenagers on the news gathered outside American high schools as police investigated a shooting death. She knew what was expected of her. If the actual emotion wasn’t there, the sense of what the media, of what life, demanded from such an event hadn’t entirely fled. She was floating through this landscape, untethered, but she was prepared to do another take.

If the feud that took Dinesh’s life was unclear, the one that prompted the hurling of a Molotov cocktail through the living room window of a house on Gilroy Drive last April was very clear. Pream Anandararajah, an 18-year-old student at Stephen Leacock Collegiate, had said to a friend the day before that he was worried that the boys who were bullying him at school would come after his family. Pream’s mother and sister were asleep in the living room when the bottle came crashing through. In the resulting fire, his mother suffered burns to 30 per cent of her body. His sister suffered non–life threatening burns. Nine young men were arrested in connection with the firebombing and other assaults.

The feud was between Sri Lankans who had recently arrived (FOBs, for “fresh off the boat”) and those who had been in Canada for some time, the group Pream was aligned with. It wasn’t a revival of religious and political battles in Sri Lanka—most of those involved are Hindu Tamils—but the distancing of new arrivals by those who were established. Sometimes, the boys admitted, it was because the FOBs, with their broken English, different clothes and alien haircuts, reminded them of themselves when they arrived, the version they had since cast off. This pattern existed in other groups: with Jamaicans in the 1980s, where new immigrants were called Freshies, and it has been seen in the Sikh community (where new arrivals are called Gurus) and Chinese community (pitting the CBCs—Canadian-born Chinese—against Chinese FOBs).

In the ephemeral world of Scar­borough gangs, there is violence within ethnic groups and between ethnic groups. But Dinesh’s murder raises the issue of what constitutes a gang, and more obliquely, of what constitutes Scarborough. The suburb has operated as a foil to Toronto for years, the unsophisticated past that Toronto feels it has sloughed off, Jersey to its Manhattan. Now it is the multicultural canary in the coal mine, a glimpse of the future.