How it is told
Who was Ghushma, and what happened to her son?
The arrangement
Sudharma and Sudeha had no children. It was Sudeha's own idea that her younger sister Ghushma should marry him so that the house would have one, and it was Sudeha who proposed it and argued for it against her husband's reluctance.
A hundred and one a day
Ghushma made a hundred and one lingams out of clay every single day, worshipped them, and set them in the village lake. A son was born. The practice did not stop when he was born; that is the point of it. It was not a transaction.
What she could not watch
The household turned around the boy and around his mother, and Sudeha found she could not live inside the thing she had arranged. The katha is honest that the jealousy is not unreasonable — she had given away her place and then had to watch someone else occupy it.
In his sleep
When the boy was newly married, she killed him in his sleep and put the body in the same lake that held the lingams. The house woke to it in the morning.
She did not stop
Told what had happened, Ghushma went and made her hundred and one lingams and said what she said every day. This is the beat the whole story exists for, and no telling softens it: she is not calm because she is sure of a miracle. She continues because continuing is what the practice is.
Out of the water
The boy walked out of the lake. Shiva appeared with him and offered to deal with Sudeha, and Ghushma asked him not to — she asked that her sister be forgiven, and that he stay. He stayed, as Ghushmeshwar, named for her, and this is the last of the twelve.